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Digital "darkroom" is the hardware, software and techniques used in digital photography that replace the darkroom equivalents, such as enlarging, cropping, dodging and burning, as well as processes that don't have a film equivalent.
Digital photography uses cameras containing arrays of electronic photodetectors to capture images focused by a lens, as opposed to an exposure on photographic film. The captured images are digitized and stored as a computer file ready for further digital processing, viewing, digital publishing or printing.
A darkroom is a workshop used by photographers working with photographic film to make prints and carry out other associated tasks. It is a room that can be made completely dark to allow the processing of the light-sensitive photographic materials, including film and photographic paper. Various equipment is used in the darkroom, including an enlarger, baths containing chemicals, and running water.
Dodging and burning are terms used in photography for a technique used during the printing process to manipulate the exposure of a selected area(s) on a photographic print, deviating from the rest of the image's exposure. In a darkroom print from a film negative, dodging decreases the exposure for areas of the print that the photographer wishes to be lighter, while burning increases the exposure to areas of the print that should be darker.
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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 a film darkroom was primarily an issue of gathering the right chemicals and lighting; a digital darkroom consists of a powerful computer, a high-quality monitor setup (dual monitors are often used) and software. A printer is optional; many photographers still send their images to a professional lab for better results and, in some cases, a better price.
A computer is a device that can be instructed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations automatically via computer programming. Modern computers have the ability to follow generalized sets of operations, called programs. These programs enable computers to perform an extremely wide range of tasks. A "complete" computer including the hardware, the operating system, and peripheral equipment required and used for "full" operation can be referred to as a computer system. This term may as well be used for a group of computers that are connected and work together, in particular a computer network or computer cluster.
While each implementation is unique, most share several traits: an image editing workstation as the cornerstone, often a database-driven digital asset management system like Media Pro 1 to manage the collection as a whole, a RAW conversion tool like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or Capture One, 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.
A database is an organized collection of data, generally stored and accessed electronically from a computer system. Where databases are more complex they are often developed using formal design and modeling techniques.
Operations on a collection of digital assets requires the use of a computer application implementing digital asset management (DAM) to ensure that the owner, and possibly their delegates, can perform operations on the data files.
A camera raw image file contains minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, or motion picture film scanner, or other image scanner. Raw files are named so because they are not yet processed and therefore are not ready to be printed or edited with a bitmap graphics editor. Normally, the image is processed by a raw converter in a wide-gamut internal color space where precise adjustments can be made before conversion to a "positive" file format such as TIFF or JPEG for storage, printing, or further manipulation. This often encodes the image in a device-dependent color space. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of raw formats in use by different models of digital equipment.
The term was coined by Gerard Holzmann of Bell Labs for a book entitled Beyond Photography: The Digital Darkroom, in which he describes his pico image manipulation language (not to be confused with the pico programming language). [1]
Nokia Bell Labs is an industrial research and scientific development company owned by Finnish company Nokia. Its headquarters are located in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Other laboratories are located around the world. Bell Labs has its origins in the complex past of the Bell System.
