Working with digital images
Even judging by the standards of improvements in information technology, progress in the world of digital imaging technology has been at an incredible pace. The affordable digital camera was on the market for barely more than a decade when Kodak announced it was dropping it’s manufacturing of traditional 35 mm film cameras. Every shopping mall and every tourist resort had its rapid photo development business and mail order photo processing services were huge businesses. Now virtually every one of them has have been replaced by the digital image.
Compact digital cameras cost not much more than the price of developing a few rolls of film yet they can store enough images to fill an album, and need cost nothing to run. Instead of printing images (now possible in the home with low-cost color printers) more and more people are uploading and sharing their images via websites and social media networks.
And forget about red-eye reduction or other feature effects you could have had for a few cents extra – with a bit of effort and learning anybody can now edit images on their PC. Magazine publishers have since the dawn of the industry been touching up photos to make them look more attractive (or more ugly and sinister in some cases) using airbrushing and other techniques which required mini-laboratories. Now everyone can have a bash at doing this themselves using nothing more than their keyboard and mouse.
While digital cameras were quick to drop in price to levels that ordinary people could afford, the same cannot be said for image manipulation software. One of the first to the market and probably still the best known is Adobe Photoshop. This is a hugely versatile product which can basically do anything you could ever imagine wanting to do with an image, but even today it comes with a very hefty price tag. Fortunately, the world of open source software has stepped into the breech and now you can own your own image manipulation software for absolutely nothing. GIMP is a product which was initially designed to run on Unix based operating systems but is now available in a Windows format as well.
It has to be said that digital image manipulation software is not the easiest to use. There is not a lot you will be able to do without taking some time out to learn how the software works. Straightaway, you will be able to do simple things like re-size an image, or reduce an image’s resolution for use on a website. But it is going to take a bit more time to grasp the finer points of digital image manipulation and you are going to have to understand a host of terms you are unlikely to have come across. You will need to grasp the idea of layers, know what alpha channels are and know when to use HSV noise filters.
The beauty of digital image manipulation is that if you mess it up you can always start again with your original image.
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