Digital Photography and Computers

[dfreeman]

Digital Photography is a wonderful thing. It allows you to take you photographs and do the complex darkroom functions on a computer and get great results. 8)

Now I am sure that I will hear from some that this manupulation of image is wrong and bad. ;D This can be debated endlessly. For a good discussion on this subject, reference Jack and Sue Drafahl, "Digital Imaging for the Underwater Photographer", Amherst Media, 2002. This book covers this debate better than I can and provides a great reference for Digital image taking, editing and storage.

What I will try to do is show things that can be done with images and get some discussion going on picture techniques. Should spark a little debate and we may learn a few things.

Two areas that come up often is editing software and how to keep track of all of those pictures.

For editing I use Adobe Photoshop CS. Not cheap, ??? but it is powerful and the CS version is relatively user friendly, which was not true in the past. There are a number of one-step functions on this software that do a great job on digital photographs and underwater pictures in particular. If you want to try this software there is a 30-day free download of the full version from Adobe at their web site .

However, not all people are willing to get Photoshop CS. What have other users been working with?

I have a library of 8,000 pictures :o that I have taken since I went digital 2 years ago. About half are underwater pictures. This became a major storage and retreival issue. I have been using Adobe Photoshop Ablum to keep this all straight. This software has worked well for me. Anyone using any other software?

Lets hear some feedback.

Doug