Adjustment Layer

What Is an Adjustment Layer and How Is It Used in Image Editing? This is a layer containing an image adjustment or effect instead of image content. Like a red Cellophane overlay on a print, an adjustment layer will alter the appearance of layers below it, but not actually alter their content, making adjustment layers a cornerstone of reversible, ‘non-destructive’ editing. The adjustment can be altered, hidden or removed at any point. Adjustment layers allow photographers to experiment with edits to their photographs without risking permanently changing the original image content. Adjustment layers can also be copied and applied to …

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Color Palette

What is a Color Palette When Talking About Photography and Image Editing? Also referred to as ‘palette’ the term ‘color palette’ describes the entire range of colors that can be rendered by a digital device such as a camera LCD or a computer monitor, or the range of colors contained within a specific image. A computer monitor may have a color palette of 16 million colors, an image on the other hand often contains a much smaller number, often 256. The term is also used to describe a collection of colors, usually displayed graphically in RGB triplets, which a user …

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Cropping

What Does Cropping Mean Cropping is the process of trimming the edges of a photo, either digitally with photo processing software, of physically when a print is trimmed with a knife or guillotine.  Ideally, cropping should be used as a tool to improve upon the composition of the original photo, though sometimes it is necessary in order to make an image fit a specific dimension of photographic frame. The crop tool is one of the most important and widely used tools in any image processing software, whether it is in a mobile app, or a full-blown piece of computer software …

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Digital Asset Management

What Is Digital Asset Management? The term “Digital Asset Management” is a bit of a mouthful so most people refer to it by the acronym, DAM.  Please see the DAM entry in the photography glossary to get more information on what this is and why it’s important to photographers.   Additional Reading What Is Photo Mechanic? What Is Lightroom? What Does DAM Mean?  

Halo

What Is a Halo in Photography and Image Editing? If you’ve heard the term “halo” discussed in the context of photo editing, you might be wondering what it means. No, it’s not a ring of light around a person’s head in a photo! A halo is a bright line that can appear in areas of high contrast on a photo when the photo has been subjected to very heavy amounts of editing, particularly HDR editing. An example of a high contrast area would be a dark mountain on a bright sky. The area where the sky meets the mountains is …

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Image Browser

What is an Image Browser and how is it used in photography? An Image browser is a piece of software specifically designed to allow viewing of digital image files. Modern digital photographers often have catalogues of tens of thousands of digital photographs, an image browser can be used to quickly visually search, organize and delete image files. Image browsers allow images to be organized on the fly using information stored in the image file’s metadata. This allows a photographer to find specific images or types of images extremely quickly, a much better solution that looking through thousands of images one …

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Image Editor

What Is an Image Editor and How Is It Used When Taking Photographs? When talking about photography, an image editor is a piece of computer software which is used to edit a digital image file. Modern editing software, for example Adobe Photoshop, is extremely powerful allowing the quick application of complex editing techniques such as color mapping, masking and retouching in a non destructive environment; changes made to the original digital image file can be undone allowing a photographer to experiment with various techniques to produce a desired image. The pattern of changes made to an image can also be saved …

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Interpolation

What Does it Mean to Interpolate an Image? In simple terms, digital image interpolation is just digital enlargement. If you had a photo with pixel dimensions of 6,000 x 4,000 px, and you used photo editing software to increase the image size of the photo to 10,000 x 6,667 px, this would be an interpolation. In this process you have ended up with more pixels than your camera gave you in the file to begin with, so where exactly do all these new pixels come from? The interpolation process essentially moves existing pixels apart and then inserts new pixels in …

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KB

What Does KB Mean When Talking About Photography? The acronym ‘KB’ refers to one ‘kilobyte’, a unit of measurement used to describe the size of a digital file. One kilobyte is comprised of 1,024 bytes of digital information. When a picture is captured on a digital camera the resulting file must be stored on the cameras memory; Depending of the resolution of the captured image, and the file format used to encode it, an image will take up a certain number of kilobytes on the cameras memory. Dividing the total size of a camera’s memory in kilobytes by the size in …

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Kilobyte

What Is a Kilobyte and How Is It Used in Photography? The term ‘kilobyte’ or KB refers to a unit of measurement used to describe the size of a digital file. One kilobyte is comprised of 1,024 bytes of digital information. When a picture is captured on a digital camera the resulting file must be stored on the cameras memory; Depending of the resolution of the captured image, and the file format used to encode it, an image will take up a certain number of kilobytes on the cameras memory. Dividing the total size of a camera’s memory in kilobytes by …

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