Digital Camera World - UK (2019-10)

52 DIGITAL CAMERA^ OCTOBER 2019 http://www.digitalcameraworld.com

Camera

College

What’s the deal

with digital processing?

If you shoot JPEGs or movie clips, you need to pay more attention to

the treatments your camera applies, compared with shooting raw...

Last issue we looked

at raw files, and why

choosing to shoot raw inevitably

means spending additional time

in front of a computer in order to

process your images. You can,

of course, let your preferred raw

software automatically take

care of the image processing

business for you, but it’s hard

to resist tweaking sliders and

generally getting involved.

But what if you don’t want

to have to do that? What if you

want to shoot JPEGs and get the

image ‘right’ in-camera? In this

case you need to make sure that

as well as getting your pictures

in focus and well-exposed, the

way in which your camera will

process your images is set up

correctly for each shot.

Digital image processing is

essentially a series of software

adjustments that are applied

once the sensor has been

exposed and your photo

is converted into a digital form.

Your image actually starts out

as an electrical signal generated

by the camera’s analogue image

sensor; this can be tweaked by

electronic circuitry to increase

the ISO sensitivity, for example

(which is why an image’s ISO

cannot be changed in digital

software at a later stage).

Once the image has been

converted into digital data,

which uses the same binary

language as computers, your

camera’s image processor

crunches the huge amount

of information that’s

The decisions about how an image is processed –

from the crop to the colours – are locked into

a JPEG image once it’s created.

Marcus

Hawkins

Photographer and

writer Marcus is a

former editor of

Digital Camera

The complete guide to modern photography

Original^ scene

Processed JPEG