Digital darkroom

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Digital "darkroom" is the software and techniques used in digital photography that replace the darkroom equivalents, such as enlarging, cropping, burning and dodging, as well as processes that don't have a film equivalent.

All photographs benefit from being developed. With film this could be done at the print lab, or an inexpensive home darkroom. With digital, many cameras are set up to do basic photo enhancement (contrast, color saturation) immediately after a picture is exposed, and to deliver a finished product. Higher end cameras, however, tend to give a flatter, more neutral image that has more data but less "pop," and needs to be developed in the digital darkroom.

Setting up an analogue (i.e. film) darkroom was primarily an issue of gathering the right chemicals and lighting; a digital darkroom consists of a powerful computer, and software. A printer is optional; many photograhers still send their images to a professional lab for better results and, in some cases, a better price.

While each implementation is unique, most share several traits: an image editing workhorse like Photoshop or The Gimp as the cornerstone, often a database-driven catalogue or asset management system to manage the collection as a whole, a RAW conversion tool, and in many cases the software that came with the camera is used as an automated tool to "upload" photos to the computer. The machine itself is almost always outfitted with as much RAM as possible and a large storage subsystem - big hard drives. RAID and external USB and Firewire drives are popular for storage. Most photographers consider a DVD-burner essential for making long term backups, and keep at least one set off-site.

[edit] Software

This article contains unencyclopedic lists that may require cleanup.
To meet Wikipedia's quality standards, please help improve this article by: removing items which are not notable, encyclopedic, or helpful from embedded lists; incorporating appropriate items into the main body of the article; and discussing this issue on the talk page.

This varies based on the photographer's needs and budget, but the most common tools in a digital darkroom are:

Photoshop, ideally CS 2, the newest version, is the gold standard. (Many cameras come with Photoshop Elements, however, and this is satisfactory for most photographers.) This includes Adobe Bridge to view a folder full of images as thumbnails and pull them into Photoshop as needed, and Adobe Camera Raw (or "ACR") to convert RAW files into a useable format.
Paint Shop Pro (or "PSP") is popular image-editing application that competes with Photoshop as a commercial product.
The Gimp is an open-source (and hence, free) image-editing application. It's used less commonly because many photographers find it difficult to operate, although newer versions show improvement here.
Capture One is a "workflow tool," and considered by many to be the best RAW converter around. This is a commercial product, and among the more expensive.
Other RAW conversion tools include: Bibble, QImage, dcraw, software from the camera manufacturers, and many others; almost all of them are commercial.
Exif Harvester is a tool that analyzes a large collection of files and extracts their metadata, helping the photographer find usage patterns and keep detailed records. This is freeware.
Many photographers also create web albums, and use a wide variety of tools to do so. Among the more popular are Dreamweaver, FrontPage, Photoshop's automation feature, and many sites that offer photo hosting as a service.

[edit] Hardware

In the past, all digital media projects, photography included, were the almost exclusive domain of the Mac. Today, there is very little meaningful difference between platforms, in part because the hardware is converging, and in part because of vast improvements in Windows since the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, a number of professional designers still prefer the Mac platform today, because this is what they learned on.

More importantly, a digital darkroom workstation is a fast, powerful machine. In fact, many professional as well as dedicated hobbiest or amateur photographers who shoot a high volume have workstations that rival the average file server in a medium sized company. This is actually often a dedicated machine on a home network, and commonly doubles as a file server.

A "beefy" digital darkroom workstation will have three logical (and physically independent) hard drives: one to store the operating system and software, another for the swap / scratch file, and a third for the image files. This helps to balance disc I/O and reduce contention. Other popular enhancements are to use as much physical RAM as possible, and dual-core or multiple CPUs. nVidia and ATI are the preferred graphics cards for such a machine.