4 Phases of Processing the Digital Image
Camera Image
Final Image
With my many years in photography (Polaroid R&D Emulsions; Nikon; US Patent in Color Printing; Olympus; teaching; etc.), the single biggest evolution in photography was not Film to Digital but the non-destructive processing of digital camera raw image capture. (a.k.a. Parametric Image Editing – P. I. E.).
There are many aspects to consider in the digital image workflow (exposure considerations, raw data converters, etc.) which I will address in other articles. In this post,I will address the single biggest evolution – the non-destructive processing of the digital raw image data. I will chart the 4 distinct phases of processing the digital image and the parallel steps to B&W film processing. And, at the end, I will show an example with the digital processing applied for each of these 4 Phases. Let’s begin…
It is become apparent to me that there are distinctly 4 Phases when processing the digital image: 1. Import 2. Global 3. Selective 4. Expressive