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The digital darkroom of today is the place where serious photographers extend their creativity beyond the capabilities of their camera. My digital darkroom is very simple and includes Adobe PhotoShop™, Adobe Camera Raw™ (ACR), and various image editing plugins for sharpening, recovering shadow detail, reducing noise for high ISO photography (even more than ACR, which is very good), increasing resolution, among others. I also use a Wacom™ pressure sensitive tablet and a Macintosh™ notebook, which I often take with me on field trips.
Tools can and are changing very quickly
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Original out of the camera 3456 x 2303 pixels. 100% - 72ppi crop. A bit soft when viewed at screen resolution, as this is, but still quite sharp enough for prints up to about 10 x 12 when printed at 240 ppi. This crop is from a RAW file with no in-camera or Photoshop sharpening, colour, contrast or level adjustments. I used Digital Photo Professional to convert to tiff. |
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Sharpened and upsampled to 7248 x 4831 (30" x 20" at 240 ppi) using SI Pro. Shown at 50% of original size for comparison - 72ppi. This file will print clear and sharp poster size prints on any professional Giclée printer. |
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Fred Miranda, a professional photographer and programmer, has developed some exceptional tools for pro dSLR and consumer digital cameras to clean up, sharpen and enlarge/reduce digital picture files. I bought Fred's Resize Pro plugin for the Rebel 350D and it has proven to be exceptional. At $29 USD I would have paid at least 4 times the price for anything else, and it would not have been as good in my opinion. Resize Pro upsamples and sharpens automatically, in a single step, and is matched to the files created for each dSLR camera.
Fred Miranda is in the process of re-writing some of his plugins to work specifically with Photoshop CS5 and the newer cameras. When they are available you should give them a try. Search for FM Software.
Pros always shoot RAW
Always shoot RAW instead of JPEG. There are many reasons for this and I'll only mention a few here. Shooting RAW puts you firmly in control of the image because there is no in-camera modifications allowed. It provides a file of exactly what the camera recorded. This requires more work on your part but if you are doing any kind of critical work it is important. For instance, RAW gives you a much higher range of colours and complete control of levels to correct for any error in contrast and white balance.
Another advantage of RAW is that, when software improves in the future, and it will, and provides new features and better control, then you will be able to go back and open your original RAW files and process them again if you should decide you want to. Can't do that with JPEG.
There are several great Websites that show the advantages of shooting RAW, what a RAW workflow is, and how to use all the features available. There are also several good books if you're a "book" person. Be aware, however, that RAW files can be BIG, much bigger than JPEG. So you will need a large memory card.
This section will grow over time. I'll be adding much more detail as well as including some examples. If there's one thing I love talking about as much as painting, it's photography.
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