Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

What all this adds up to is a new software industry looking after the needs of photographers
whatever their level of expertise. At the highest levels, users can choose between
wide-gamut color spaces with linear or gamma curves, while at lower levels beginners
use “one-click” or “quick-fix” software to correct everything at once. There are now so
many packages you could easily spend tens of thousands of dollars on them. Fortunately,
you need only a few to have most bases covered because of their overlapping functionality.
Which software you choose depends on whether you are aiming for quality, speed,
or ease-of-use, or perhaps the best possible compromise among all three.
Open for Business
Nikon’s “vibration reduction” is Canon’s “image stabilization.” It is difficult to imagine
that camera manufacturers will ever embrace an entirely open approach to camera
design, because they are reluctant even to use the same words for similar technologies.
At first they insisted on having on-board processing, proprietary RAW formats, and
non-detachable lenses. Each camera was a closed system, their makers fully prepared to
do battle on the grounds of output quality, over which they had full control. Yet software
was able to move them slightly toward more openness by encouraging the rapid
growth of the DSLR with its detachable lenses. Proprietary RAW formats were unlocked
(by Dave Coffin) and desktop-based RAW processing software started to become popular
among photographers who wanted to extract the last ounce of quality from the
original file. As for non-detachable lenses and their unquestionable advantage in banishing
dust problems—why be restricted to a single lens when software can so easily
remove dust spots as well as hot, stuck, and dead pixels?
Manufacturers now accept that digital photography has become a more open medium
where total control by a single company is neither possible nor desirable. Nowhere is
this trend better demonstrated than in color management. Until recently, the only way
to manage color effectively was to ensure a perfect match between each pair of devices.
You still need to do this, but the devices are now interchangeable, thanks to the efforts
of the International Color Consortium (ICC). Color calibration, with resulting profiles
embedded by software into image files, has taken the whole industry forward, starting
with the professional user but already filtering down to home use in low-cost products.
The Adobe Effect
Introduction xxi
Software developers are much more canny than hardware manufacturers about the
virtues of openness. You could scarcely have a more open format than TIFF, devised by
Aldus Corporation before the 1994 merger with Adobe. Photoshop itself owes some of
its success to third-party developers with all their plug-ins for the main program. Now
Adobe is promoting its DNG format as a common denominator for all RAW files, thus