National Audubon Society Guide To Nature Photography:

Part six: Digital Processing


When going out shooting it's important to bring memory cards to store the pictures on. The book recommends 1-2 GB memory cards so that if you somehow loose the data you've used more than one memory card for shooting. Pretty self-explained is that you should upload the pictures on a bigger hard drive or other device at the end of the day to make sure you have a back-up.

After taking all your pictures it's time for editing them. The image can now be processed from RAW format to standard TIFF, PSD, or JPEG formats that can be adjusted with image processing software and can be read by other computers. The best image editing software is according to the book Adobe Photoshop. It allows you to tune color balance and saturation, brightness and contrast, dodge and burn, remove imperfections, and also straighten horizons and many other editing functions.

It's really good to take pictures in RAW mode, which is what the professional photographers use. It saves the data as its original and it therefore allows you to do more changes on your own afterwards which gives you a lot more freedom. When you convert your photos, you should do so to TIFF or PSD format, JPEG loses data in compression.

When editing pictures, the first thing is usually to adjust the brightness of the picture. It is a fine-tuning of your exposure that you used taking the picture, and doing this makes judging other changes of the image more accurate. If you used the histogram when taking the image, usually you only need a minor adjustment. Then adjusting saturation is also a good feature to serve as reference, it makes a master correction to all colors. But avoid to pump up colors excessively, it makes it fake. Contrast is one of the most important qualities of an image. It's the degree of difference between adjacent colors. The last step of adjusting an image is the sharpening. It doesn't add more detail or resolution, it increases the contrsast between adjacent pixels so the detail is more succinct. Be careful so you don't oversharp which is the biggest risk.