Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers: A professional image editor’s guide to the creative use of Photoshop for the Macintosh and PC

Chapter 7. Extending the Dynamic Range

For many years now, everyone has become preoccupied with counting the numbers of pixels in a digital capture as if this were the only benchmark of image quality that mattered above all else. Yet size isn’t everything, because it is the quality of the pixels we should be concerned with most. Digital SLR cameras tend to have better quality sensors than compact digitals and large high-end camera backs have features such as built-in cooling mechanisms that can produce the very best in image capture quality. The one thing people haven’t focused on so much is the dynamic range of a camera sensor. Dynamic range refers ...