The Creative Digital Darkroom

written by Katrin Eismann & Seán Duggan

The Creative Digital Darkroom

Chapters 1: Silver to Silicon

The strategies used in the digital 'darkroom' are based on those used in the real darkroom, but, with more flexibility and less mess! Not only that, the digital darkroom offers the poser to be able to change an image selectively...that is that any corections made can be limited to small aeas rather than globally. And, results to the image can be seen during the digital process as opposed to waiting to the end of the darkroom process to find that it didn't work as expected! Not only time saving,but materials and paper saving.

Quantity vs Quality-it all depends on the reason for the images on how you should invest your time. Is it for a catalog or is it a one shot deal for perfection.

Master Image File - digitally, it is easy to make very small to very large images from one but with that goes the responsibility to organize your photo files. Descriptive along with camera file naming of your master file is helpful and returning to it keeps down multiple copies. I gave this problem and will begin a new workflow for myself.

Making the Selects - use a binary system! It is good, or it isn't good. Then, re-cycle through and choose those that merit 1 to 5 stars. Usually very few 5 star images!

The Five Step Work Process

These steps illustrate the book's general digital darkroom workflow and the structure for the book as goes through these techniques..

1. Acquire
2. Prepare
3. Enhance
4. Interpret
5. Output

Chapter 2: Digital Nuts and Bolts

This chapter addresses the digital darkroom in which one works: Photoshop Preferences, Color Settings and Policies, and Efficient File Navigation.

Changing photoshop preferences has already given me a problem. The first, when I changed the scratch disk from the C Drive to the 250G external drive, would not allow me to start Photoshop and was giving the message that the disk was locked. I found that starting as Administrator allowed me to open Photoshop.

Next, after getting the 1T drive, I wanted to change the scratch disk to that. I knew there would be a problem. Here is how I solved it this time: Start photoshop CS3 while holding down alt/ctrl/shift and changing the drives when the change preferences window appears. I have had to do it several times because in restarting the computer, the external drive letters were transposed, so preferences needed to be changed again.

I have changed color settings, know that I can return to chapter 2 if I have questions about working on images which may need different than what I have set. sRGB is the default color working space which I have now changed to Adobe RGB 1998. I also made another color space and saved it! I had never before gone about changing things like this! When I need to know/choose more shall return to pp. 27-36.

Problems

My biggest problems for these chapters came when I began shifting scratch disks around. Photoshop would not open! I feel it was probably worth the suffering because I did learn how to get Photoshop to open again! I now know when something begins to act unpredictably, changing preferences m ight solve the problem.

Also, in shifting external hard drives around, one of them became write protected. I turned it off and then back on and it became okay. I learned what a write protection fault is.

• Index
• Chapters 1-2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Olympus Manual
• Krisse
• Judy
• CDD Website
• Scanning Basics
• Hello World

Images and work are © R.Joanne Johnson unless tagged as images being used from The Creative Digital Darkroom website.