Macro Photography Photo Workshop

Chapter 10. THE DIGITAL DARKROOM

Building a Digital Darkroom

Understanding What All the Buttons Do

Fixing Common Issues in Macro Photos

Photographing In RAW Format

Using High-Level Digital Editing Techniques

A lot of the focus in this book has been on creating photos. There is no doubt that shutter times, lenses, tripods, and ISO speeds are important to get right. After all, you want the best possible ingredients for the final result. However, over the years of working with digital photography, I have grown to realize that the photos themselves are merely starting points for greatness. A photo that is unintentionally out of focus, excessively motion-blurry, or grossly over-exposed is never a work of art. See 10-1 for an example of a photo that's beyond reprieve despite excessive work in Photoshop trying to rescue it.

In the era before digital photography, a frame of silm was the starting block for what happens during developing and copying. By over- or under-developing film on purpose, you can create variety of effects. By using different grades of paper when printing, you can increase and decrease the contrast of a photo. By using bleach or burning tools, you can lighten or darken part of a photo. I'm sharing all of this to get a simple point across. Working on a photo in the digital darkroom isn't cheating! It's a tool, similar to the dark room of days gone by, that you can use to finish a process that starts in a camera and ends on your wall, on a Web site, or as a file on your computer, ...