Photo-editing A-Z

A

• Aberrations (8)Optical flaws in camera lenses, such as distortion, chromatic aberration (color fringing), vignetting (corner shading) and edge softness. Lens makers go to great efforts to create optical formulations for reducing or removing aberrations, but these can be corrected digitally today too, either in-camera or in software.
• ACDSee (1)ACDSee is a photo editing software company best known for its flagship product, ACDSee Photo Studio, but which also publishes a photo editor called Gemstone. ACDSee focuses on Windows software but does produce a Mac version of ACDSee Photo Studio. • ACDSee website
• ACROS (Fujifilm) (3)Black and white film simulation mode in Fujifilm cameras. It’s designed to give richer, more intense tonal rendition than the regular monochrome film simulation. It's effective enough, but most photographers would do this in software rather than in-camera.
• Adjustment brush (5)A tool used to ‘paint’ adjustments on to an image manually, and one of the key adjustment tools in Lightroom, for example. It’s called an adjustment brush here, but it could just be called ‘brush’ in other programs, or ‘masking brush’. You can choose the adjustments you want to make, e.g. exposure, saturation, clarity and so on before you start painting, or make changes to these settings afterwards too.
• Adjustment layer (6)A special type of layer in image-editing software which is designed to hold adjustments rather than other image layers. It's a way of 'stacking' a series of adjustments to an image without affecting the image layer itself.
• Adobe (5)Giant software company that dominates the creative software industry. Adobe publishes not just Photoshop and Lightroom, but Premiere Pro and After Effects video editing software, InDesign page layout and Illustrator vector drawing software and a whole lot more as part of its Creative Cloud ecosystem.
• Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) (2)Software that works alongside Adobe Photoshop to open and process RAW files before they open in Photoshop itself. Adobe Camera Raw’s tools are also built into Adobe Lightroom. Most people use Adobe Camera Raw to process their RAW files simply because they’re using Photoshop or Lightroom, but other RAW converters are available.
• Adobe RGB (2)Professional color space offered by more advanced cameras and editing software. It captures a slightly wider range of colors than the usual sRGB color space used by most consumer devices. It can be useful if pictures are destined for commercial print production, but it does introduce complications with color profiles and monitor calibration.
• Affinity Photo (3)For a long time Adobe Photoshop has been the only real professional level image-editing program, but software company Serif has launched a professional photo editing program which competes directly with Photoshop at a much lower price – and for a single payment rather than the software subscription system introduced by Adobe. Affinity Photo has been built from the ground up for speed and performance and compatibility with the Photoshop PSD file format.
• AI (artificial intelligence) (12)Machine-based learning which interprets the contents of the image in a sophisticated way to produce better enhancements or better object and scene recognition. Skylum’s Accent – AI Filter in Luminar uses artificial intelligence to optimise photos automatically, while Google Photos uses artificial intelligence to identify and search through your pictures.
• AI mask (5)AI masking is a big thing in photo editing software today. AI is used to recognise and select different objects and areas in the scene so that you can carry out local adjustments without having to create selections and masks manually. It has simplified complex photo editing considerably.
• Album (5)A kind of ‘virtual’ container for photographs you want to keep together. When you use an album (or ‘collection’) in photo editing software, it keeps the images together without actually moving them on your hard disk.
• Analog (13)A term now used to design old-fashioned chemical processes to capture images rather than digital – so you can get ‘analog’ cameras, ‘analog’ films and ‘analog’ image effects which replicate the look of these old processes.
• Analog Efex (Nik Collection) (10)Analog Efex Pro is part of the DxO Nik Collection. It recreates the look of old films, darkroom processes and vintage cameras by combining image adjustments and filter effects as presets which you can apply with a single click or customise yourself.
• Aperture (Apple) (3)Now discontinued, Aperture was Apple's Mac-only professional photo organising, processing and non-destructive editing program. It was a direct rival to Lightroom, but while it had far more sophisticated and effective image organising tools, it fell behind for editing tools and was eventually abandoned.
• Artefact/artifact (7)Any unwanted digital flaw in a photo, such as exaggerated sharpening and edge ‘halos’ around objects, banding or ‘posterisation’ due to excessive image manipulation.
• Art Filter (1)Art Filters are a feature of Olympus/OM System cameras. They are special film style effects covering a broad range of looks, from high contrast black and white to vivid soft focus colors and pastel effects. They are more than just a novelty, offering a range of striking and appealing effects not found on other cameras.
• Aspect ratio (3)This the picture’s proportions as width versus height. DSLR sensors have a 3:2 ratio, so that photographs are 3 units wide to 2 units high. Most compact camera sensors have a slightly squarer 4:3 aspect ratio. It doesn’t matter what the units are – the ratio stays the same, so a photo could measure 3 inches by 2 inches or 6 meters by 4 meters and still have the same 3:2 aspect ratio. You can shoot in different aspect ratios by cropping the sensor area. HD video is shot in a wider 16:9 ratio.
• Asset management (5)The professional term for image cataloguing, and often used in photographic or design studios managing large numbers of images on a commercial basis. They may include not just photos but illustrations, logos and other graphics, hence ‘assets’ rather than photos.
• Aurora HDR (Skylum) (6)HDR software developed in conjunction with HDR specialist Trey Ratcliff. Aurora HDR can work with single images or merge a series of bracketed exposures. You can apply one of many different preset effects or create your own with the manual controls.