Digital Photography Editing

Digital technology constitutes a broadening of photographic possibilities that don't only mean a break with film photograph, but also offers new tools in the field. Digital files can be obtained trough negatives, transparencies or prints on photographic paper, and vice versa. Laboratories with digital technology can make prints on photographic paper and slides from digital files, and also scan our film with professional quality and turn them in recorded on a CD.

Digital editing is enormously useful even if we only use film, since any problem that a negative , slide or print may have can be cured, with some limitations, with our home computer and an image editing program. If we also have a black and white darkroom, or if we don't have a special interest in obtaining prints on photographic paper, we will need to have a good printer that provides quality copies at a reasonable price. In the great majority of cases a digital image is not printed without editing, meaning basic characteristics

such as size, resolution, contrast, color balance, retouching spots or dust spots, the final frame, etc. Many of these tasks are complicated in a dark room, and were hard to obtain in an industrial laboratory. Now we have, in our house, a potent tool that lets us give photographic images, digital or on film, exactly the aspect we want. Once the image is edited and saved, any lab with digital technology can print it on photographic black and white or color paper with an almost null margin of error regarding our specifications and desires. Going to a photographic lab with a roll of film and picking up a CD, or turning in a disc and picking up printed copies is a novelty which we will get used to quickly. The editing program Adobe Photoshop is considered the standard for image editing and other design functions. Many peripherals, specially printer, include the Limited Edition (LE) of this program, which allows us to use basic functions. Other editing programs are equally valid and have similar functions.