Digital Sports Photography: Take Winning Shots Every Time

Chapter 10. Working in a Digital Studio

© Amber Palmer

The digital studio, or digital darkroom, as it's sometimes called, is an essential part of digital photography for amateurs, pros, and enthusiasts alike And with digital virtually everyone has a computer and is at least potentially capable of processing his or her own photographs While it's conceivable that you could simply have a digital camera and take your flash cards to a lab to be printed, it's by far the majority of photographers who process them to some degree on the computer first.

Figure 10-1, for example, is a photo I shot of U S Olympic and World Champion foil fencer Emily Cross winning a gold medal at the 2005 Junior & Cadet World Fencing Championships in Linz, Austria The image is okay, but it could use a little improvement in the digital studio, such as cropping and sharpening So, with just a little work in the digital studio, the final version emphasizes the subject much better, as you can see in Figure 10-2

Figure 10-1. Emily Cross wins a gold medal. But the shot could benefit from some editing to really make it shine.

Figure 10-2. This the same photo of Emily Cross after being edited using sharpening, cropping, touch-up, ...