General Digital Camera Photo Image Editing

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Photos from digital cameras tend to look alike. They're a little dark, lack contrast, lack saturation, and generally don't compare well against a standard photograph. Are there a standard series of image editing tricks to bring some life into a digital camera photograph?

-- Richard Reynolds (foobar@aol.com), September 14, 1998

Answers

In an effort to preserve tonal information, many digicams are conservative in how they utilize the available 8 bits of dynamic range. The result is low contrast & saturation, since both the highlight and shadows are pulled in from the ends of the range a bit. If you have Photoshop, and "auto levels" operation will often do wonders. Or, manually pull the shadow and highlight sliders in a little. The darkness could just be a gamma difference between how the camera is set up and your monitor. PCs tend to show things dark, Macs show them lighter. Many photo-editing packages have a "gamma" slider or adjustment that you can tweak to increase the "brightness" in a well-balanced way. Hope this helps, any other thoughts, others please chime in!

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), September 14, 1998.

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