Digital Camera Techniques

16 Imaging software

Despite what should be the over-riding importance of a good filing system (see Chapter 14), the first piece of software that most digital photographers consider buying is an image manipulation program. Potentially, this topic is a complete book in its own right. In fact, each image manipulation program could be a complete book. But some of the basic functions are common to all programs, and are worth covering in brief here for the sake of completeness.

Firstly there are format changes. In particular, every time that a JPEG picture is resaved, it is recompressed, and this degrades the image data. It is therefore useful to convert JPEG pictures to an uncompressed format before doing any work on the files. The best format to ...