Digital manipulation can transform your pictures in all manner of useful ways. Whatever camera you use, your whole approach to photography may change.
Whether you use a traditional film camera or a digital camera, computer manipulation of images has had a profound effect on creative photography in recent years. It has always been possible to play around with pictures after they have been taken, using darkroom and retouching techniques. But digital manipulation packages, such as Photoshop, have turned highly specialised processes into relatively straightforward ones interior photographers md dc va. Effects that can take hours to achieve in a darkroom can be created in a few minutes on a computer. Furthermore, if you make a mistake, or you need another print, there is no need to start again.
Those using digital cameras have a head start, but film users can have their pictures digitised by their processing lab, or using their own scanner. To begin manipulating, all that is needed is a modest, though relatively modern, computer, and a manipulation package (an excellent low-cost choice is Adobe Photoshop Elements – a budget, but only slightly stripped-down, version of its professional package).
The holiday photographer, of course, is unlikely to take a laptop to a destination, just so he or she can transform and perfect each image of an evening. Such things are more sensibly left until the return home. However, the fact that pictures can be changed at a later date can have a significant effect on the equipment that you take with you on holiday and on the pictures that you actually take. Those who have got used to working in the digital darkroom always have half an eye on how the shot they are shooting could be improved on a PC.
It is not uncommon, for instance, for photographers to use two cameras in tandem, one with black-and-white film, and the other with colour. But in the digital domain switching from colour to black and white is a single-stage process – and now photographers are increasingly shooting everything in colour, even if they know that eventually the shot will be used in black and white.
Similarly, some accessories and specialist equipment can be adequately mimicked on the computer. Simple filter effects, such as graduated skies, can be introduced into a picture with a manipulation program – which might save on how much gear you have to cart around the globe with you. Even professional architectural photographers think twice about taking a bulky and valuable shift lens with them on an overseas assignment – but now converging verticals can be corrected for on screen, once you return home.