Digital photographs: how to make the best of them

While a few years ago, taking photographs would stop for most people when they had pressed the button, with the advent of the digital era, making that same picture is something which can now be seen as a two-step operation: first we take the photograph, which requires a good understanding of the various camera settings; and then comes the editing phase. By using software like Photoshop or The Gimp, we can adjust the contrast, saturation, balance colors, and so on.

And if you want to go by professional standards, you will have to use the raw format. In a few words, using the raw format, means that your camera stores a lot of information, which will be very useful when it comes to adjusting exposure in Photoshop. The raw format is much better in that respect than jpg or TIFF, because there's always a loss of information when editing the latter. It is true that such an amount of information can sometimes seem a bit overkill, when we consider, for instance, that a computer screen can only display a small proportion of all that data: you won't be able to see on the screen of difference between a raw and a tiff format. And since pictures in the raw format are much bigger and use up a lot more resouces, it's wise to stop for a minute and ask yourself what you intend to do with this picture, or this set of pictures, before you take them. Cutting down on memory card expenses, that may be worth a little bit of introspection after all...