Photo

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Photographs capture a moment in time.

Photos are generally regarded as “factual,” as opposed to a drawing or painting, which would be the artist’s interpretation. Photos tend to be trusted more, because they accurately depict what was in front of the camera at the moment the picture was taken.

At least, photographs are supposed to be accurate. How easy is it to edit a photo so that it shows something different than what really happened?

The concept of photo editing is almost as old as photography itself. The first photographic images were recorded in the 1820s, and one of the first widely known edited photos was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Sometime in the 1860s, someone took a standing portrait of Southern Congressman John Calhoun, pasted in Lincoln’s face from the portrait for the five dollar bill, and created a historic photo of Lincoln on the spot.

Even an action as simple and innocent as cropping the picture can be controversial. Imagine a scene of the wreckage left by a tornado. If the photographer cropped out all of the damage, and focused instead on a single building that somehow survived, it would appear that the tornado hadn’t damaged very much at all.

In today’s world of digital photography, some photo editing is necessary on nearly every picture. Digital cameras have to “guess” at the proper color, contrast, and shading of the pictures they take, and proper use of photo editing tools can correct or even enhance the camera’s guesswork.

At the same time, digital photographers must keep in mind that photography–especially journalistic photography–is meant to be a record of a moment in time, and not an artistic recreation of what the photographer wants his audience to see. While editing photographs has become quicker and easier, the temptation to alter the photographs has risen as well.

Aperture
The Aperture is the size of the opening in the camera lens at the moment a photo is taken. Aperture is measured in fractions, so the larger the number, the smaller the aperture opening. Shutter speed and aperture are the two primary controls for limiting the amount of light that hits the film or sensor.

Application
An Application is just another word for computer program.

Browser
A Browser is an application that allows the photographer to sort and rename the pictures in his or her collection.

Burning
Burning means darkening part of a photograph. In the darkroom, it’s done by blocking some of the light that would normally reach the rest of the photo. In digital photo editing, it’s usually a paintbrush-like tool built into the application.

CD
Compact Disks are the typical means of storing digital photographs. They hold about 700 megabytes of information, and can be CD-R for writeable CDs and CD-RW for re-writeable CDs.

Cloning
Cloning is an image editing term for copying one part of the image into another part of the same image or a different image entirely. It’s used for painting out unwanted items, like electric lines.

CMYK
CMYK is an acronym for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black. These are the four colors used in the standard printing process. It’s also a color mode in photo editing programs.

Compact Flash
Compact Flash is one form of digital camera media. It was the original standard, and is still one of the most common formats.

Cropping
Cropping involves chopping out part of a picture. You might crop to focus attention on the real subject, or to remove extra stuff that intruded on the picture.

DVD

When it comes to storing digital pictures, a DVD is basically a monster-sized CD. It will hold over four and a half gigabytes of data.

Dodging
Dodging is making a section of a photo lighter. When this is done in the darkroom, it’s usually by blocking some of the light from reaching that part of the picture. In a photo editing program, it’s a paintbrush like tool that lightens instead of painting.

Download
Downloading is the opposite of uploading. Downloading means to pull data from another location. Normally it means to get data from the Internet, but in digital photography, it also means to get the pictures from the camera. Sometimes used interchangeably with Importing.

DPI
Most photo printers and monitors measure their resolution in Dots Per Inch, or DPI. The higher the number, the higher the resolution.

EXIF
EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image Format. Most digital images have two parts. The first is the image itself, which is usually stored as a JPG image. The second is the EXIF data. EXIF data most often includes all of the photographer’s information, like the date and time the picture was taken and the shutter speed and aperture set at the time.

Flip
Flipping an image is the same as reflecting it in a mirror. Flipping is one of the basic image editing tools.

Grayscale
Technically speaking, a spectrum of gray shades from black to white. A grayscale picture is the digital equivalent of a black and white photo.

Highlights
The Highlights are the whitest part of a picture. Normally, they are a very small percentage of the picture, because it’s very easy to lose details in highlights.

Histogram
A Histogram is a chart that graphs all of the tones in a photo. Most programs will generate histograms, and most digital cameras can create them also.

Image File Format
The format of an image file determines the size of the file, the overall image quality, and several other things. Common image file formats are JPG, GIF, TIFF, and PNG.

Image Resolution
The Resolution is the number of pixels, or dots, in a picture.

Inkjet Printer
An Inkjet printer sprays tiny jets of ink onto paper.

ISO
The sensitivity of film is measured by ISO, and the larger the number, the more senstive the film. ISO 100 needs a lot of light, like outdoors on a sunny day. ISO 1600 doesn’t need much light. However, higher ISO means more grain in the film. Digital images borrowed the ISO scale to measure the sensitivity of a camera sensor. Just like the grain that’s added to film at higher ISO settings, more “noise” is added to digital images at higher ISO. In general, as ISO goes up, quality goes down.

JPG or JPEG
The Joint Photographic Experts Group developed a method for making digital images smaller while sacrificing only a little bit of quality in the process. This is called JPG compression, and is the most common picture format on the Internet.

Landscape
The word landscape, like portrait, actually has two meanings. The first and original is the photography term for a picture of wide open spaces, like a mountain or sunset. The second meaning is a description of the alignment of a picture. Pictures that are oriented horizontally–with the narrow sides upright–are known as Landscape images, whether they depict a mountain or not.

Layers
Think of Layers as sheets of tracing paper or transparency film laid over top of your image. Graphic designers use layers to separate out elements of their project, so that they can work on individual pieces without damaging others. Adjustment Layers are a special kind of layer that shows the results of whatever filter or function is attached to that layer.

Media
Media is a technical term for storage. Compact disks, memory chips, even floppy disks, are all storage media. Removeable media is a chip or disk that can be moved from one computer to another without losing data.

Megabyte
A megabyte is generally about a million bytes, or a thousand kilobytes. Technically, a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes.

Megapixel
A megapixel is one million pixels, or dots. Megapixels are the de facto standard for measuring the power of a digital camera. Generally speaking, a four megapixel image can be printed at about 5×7 or perhaps even 8×10 without making the pixels so large it ruins the picture.

Memory Stick (R)
One brand of digital camera media. It looks like a small stick of chewing gum.

Online Photo Printing
Online Printers are Internet companies that allow their members to upload pictures for printing. Once the prints are done, the company then mails them to the customer.

Panning
Panning the camera involves following a moving subject while snapping the picture. Done properly, the subject will be sharp and the background behind it will be blurry. This technique can be duplicated by using a radial blur on the background in a photo editing application.

Photochopping
Also Photoshopping. Digitally altering a familiar photograph into a visual joke of some kind, usually by merging two pictures (like a shark and a rescue helicopter).

Pixel
Pixel is short for Picture Element, and it’s basically a dot. All digital pictures are made up of these dots, and counting them is a measure of the image (pixels per inch, or PPI), print (dots per inch, or DPI), and camera power (millions of pixels or megapixels).

Portrait
The word Portrait actually has two meanings. The first and original is the photography term for a picture of a person. The second meaning is a description of the alignment of a picture. Pictures that are oriented vertically–with the long sides upright–are known as Portrait images, whether they depict a person or not.

RAW
RAW is the internal format of a digital camera. Many cameras “pre-process” images. They will do JPG compression, white balancing, and a number of other adjustments. The RAW image is the starting point for all of these. Digital photographers prefer to start from the RAW file so that they can make their own changes to these items.

Red Eye
Red Eye is the reflection of the camera flash off of the back of the subject’s eyes. It happens most often with a bright flash in dim light. Many photo editing applications have red eye removal features.

Resize
Resize is one of the basic photo editing tools. It’s used to change the size or resolution of an image.

RGB
RGB is the standard color format for digital images. It stands for Red, Green, Blue. Each of the three colors is given an amount between 0 and 255, and the blend of the three produces all of the other colors. Three zeroes produce white, and three 255s produce black.

Rotate
Rotation is one of the basic photo editing tools, and is commonly used to fix portraits that have been downloaded from the camera as landscape.

Saturation
Saturation is a measure of the richness of the colors in a photo. When a picture is desaturated, all of the color information has been removed, and what’s left is a grayscale or black and white picture.

Shadows
The shadows are the darkest part of an image, just as highlights are the brightest.

Sharing
Sharing photos generally involves uploading them to a website (like Flickr) so that other people can view them or even order prints and photo gifts.

Sharpness
Sharpness is a description of the focus and clarity of a picture. It concerns how clearly the details appear to be.

Shutter Speed
Shutter Speed is the amount of time the shutter remains open when a photo is taken. Shutter Speed and Aperture together determine just how much light hits the film or camera sensor. The shutter speed is also a fraction, just like the aperture. A shutter speed of 500 is actually 1/500, or “one five hundredth of a second.”

Smart Media ™
One of the several versions of digital camera media.

Thumb Drive
A Thumb Drive is one name for a USB Flash Chip. Other nicknames are Jump Drive and USB Keychain. The Thumb Drive comes in various sizes, like 256mb, and plugs into a computer’s USB port. It’s like having a pocket hard drive.

Thumbnail
A Thumbnail is a small version of a larger picture. Many browsing and editing programs use thumbnails to index a picture collection. Some programs will even generate Contact Sheets, which are basically page after page of thumbnails showing the entire collection or directory.

Uploading
Uploading is the opposite of downloading. Uploading involves sending a file from your computer to another system, either through a cable or over the Internet.

USB
USB stands for Universal Serial Bus. It’s an industry standard for connecting things to computers. Most digital cameras and chip readers use a USB cable to connect to the computer. USB 2.0 is a newer and faster standard, but not every computer can handle the 2.0 speeds yet.

White Balance
White Balance is a camera setting used to compensate for changes in the color of light. Some artificial lights “tint” the color they project, so the camera’s white balance setting is used to balance this back to a more normal color cast. If the camera’s white balance was incorrect, then the photo editor has to account for this by changing the color scale. The program will use an area that was supposed to be white as the starting point, and will remap every other color in the picture accordingly.

Wizard
A Wizard in computer terms is a program that walks you through a process step by step. For example, a scanning wizard might ask a series of questions on color vs. black and white, automatic scratch removal, and image resolution, before it actually triggers the scanner.

Let’s say you’re on vacation. You’ve just taken a fantastic picture with your brand-new SupraUltraMax 18 megapixel camera, and you want to ship it home to all your friends and family. You find an internet cafe in the middle of a foreign country, pull the chip from your camera, and get ready to email it home–and that’s when you discover that your terrific new camera stores terrifically large images. There’s no way you can email a twenty-seven megabyte image back home. What’s worse, this Internet Cafe computer doesn’t have any image-editing programs on it, so you can’t find any way to crop or compress the image, either. Are you stuck waiting until you get home to share your images?

Not necessarily.

With the rise of broadband, several websites have popped up on the ‘net offering the ability to upload and edit pictures right there on the website.

Phixr is regarded as one of the better online editors. They have a wide variety of tools available, like Red Eye removal, Sepia conversion, OCR recognition, and Borders. They also have third-party agreements with such websites as Costco, Flickr, and Livejournal, allowing you to edit your photo online and immediately upload it to the other site. However, Phixr is not a storage site–they remove all pictures about three hours after editing is done.

PXN8 (think license plate, it’s pronounced Pixenate) has a feature called Bookmarklet that speeds up image loading. An image can be uploaded and opened in PXN8 with two mouse clicks. It has a wide variety of features and abilities, and is a favorite of reviewers because of the speed and ease of workflow.

Pixoh has one of the best interfaces of all the onlie photo editors, and one of the largest filesize limits (it will allow you to edit images up to ten megabytes in size). Unfortunately, so far it only offers a few basic features, like rotate and resize.

In the world of marketing digital cameras, megapixels seem to be the beginning and end of a camera’s power. Like a computer’s RAM and hard drive, “the more, the better,” and all of the other features of a camera fall by the roadside. But there’s more to a photo than the megapixels.

The quality of the lens, for a prime example, is a much more important feature than the pixels. A poorly built lens will take all the power out of the camera, because a fuzzy picture is still fuzzy, even at ten megapixels.

Once they’re out of the camera, megapixels are a reasonably good guide to how large a print you can get out of them. Since pixels are actually “dots,” if you enlarge the picture enough, the illusion will be broken–and the individual dots will become obvious. The more pixels, the larger you can expand the picture before the dots become visible.

As a general rule of thumb, four megapixels is perfect for 5×7 prints, but generally not much larger. There are exceptions, but they depend mostly on the subject of the picture, and not the megapixels of the camera. While a three megapixel image will look great on the computer screen, printed at 3×5, or maybe even printed at 5×7, the dots will be really obvious if the picture is blown up onto a highway billboard. Five megapixels will make for a great 8×10 print.

When it comes to enlarging pictures, photo editing programs do not have a very good track record. Shrinking a picture works very well, but enlarging is a lot more difficult–because you can’t just make the dots bigger. The program has to Interpolate–that is, it has to guess at what color the new pixels have to be. There are programs specifically designed for enlarging digital images, but it’s still a fairly new technique.