Bend it like digicam

Bend it like digicam

As a neo digital enthusiast I prefer digital cameras to take photos. Occasionally I opt digital retouching if the snaps are underexposed or degraded of white balance, sharpening, contrast, saturation, image effect, digital zoom. So it's quite common to receive remarks from my friends 'Whether I use digital camera to capture the photos, as they seem clear & contrast ? '.Though it's a simple curiosity query, It made me to feel that it's a generalized opinion on digital photo taking. Their query includes everything; digital photos can be manipulated or enhanced v/s analog photography & the originality is not the mantra of digital snaps. This is the bane & boon of digital photography perse.

Photos are perceived as the freezed-moments of the particular time frame. People try to visualize the timing, place, emotions & feelings behind the snap even all these are not inside the frame. That’s the beauty of photography. Digital photography is challenging that very essence of conventional thought of the analog snapping.

Yester years when photo-clicking media was constrained to analog cameras, photo was almost depends on the quality of lenses, photo taking abilities, technicalities of the camera. But more or less the break-even-point was ‘the moment’ the photo is captured.

Most photographers may retouch ("post-process") the digital output with Photoshop or imaging s/w to adjust levels and sharpen the image a bit. This post processing work normally done on jpeg’s after a photo is taken. For sure reasons this doesn’t make any real contribution to photo taking skills because it’s a retouch or in simple words 'fabrication'.

Here's the new approach of post-processing. How about enhancing the photo taking options in pre-processing rather than enhancing the picture itself? There comes the format called ‘RAW’. Photoshop CS2 supports editing RAW files. It makes 'post-process' of digital output more sensible.

The RAW file format is the uncompressed data file captured by a digital camera's electronic sensor. When your camera saves an image in RAW format, settings like white balance, sharpening, contrast and saturation are not applied to the image but are saved instead in a separate header. Because RAW files remain virtually untouched by in-camera processing, they are essentially the digital equivalent to exposed but undeveloped film. This makes RAW an increasingly popular format with amateur and professional digital photographers, because it affords greater flexibility and control during the editing process-if you know how to work with RAW files _ Via Oreilly