Photo-editing A-Z

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• Camera Bag (software) (1)Camera Bag and Camera Bag Pro are image effects programs designed to create a whole series of retro and contemporary photo looks using innovative tile-based cumulative edits and a catalog of one-click presets.
• Capture One (15)Capture One is an all-in-one image capture (tethered shooting), cataloguing and editing software from Danish company Phase One. Born out of its medium format studio camera products, Capture One is now a professional RAW conversion tool for DSLR and mirrorless camera owners too. It’s a premium product and its closest rival is probably Adobe Lightroom.
• Catalog (2)This is a database file used by programs like Lightroom and Capture One to organize and search a large photo collection often spread across many different folders and locations. An image catalog typically contains image thumbnails and previews, a link the original image file, image metadata such as keywords, and any image adjustments applied.
• Cataloguing software (17)Software designed to organise large collections of photos using an internal database that speeds up searches and lets you create ‘virtual’ albums and smart albums without actually having to move images on your hard disk. Adobe Lightroom is a good example, using a database ‘catalog’ to organise search and display images. Cataloguing software is more complex and powerful than image ‘browsers’ like Adobe Bridge, which simply show you the contents of folders on your computer.
• Channel (1)The data used to create digital photos is split up into three color ‘channels’ – red, green and blue, or ‘RGB’. These are then mixed to produce the millions of different colors required for lifelike pictures. In commercial printing, this red, green and blue (RGB) color model is swapped for cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK), which are the four colors used by commercial printing presses.
• Channel mixer (1)A Photoshop tool for varying the mix of the red, green and blue color channels in a photo. It can be used for color adjustments but is more often used when converting images to black and white to control the tonal rendition. Most software now offers more subtle and sophisticated black and white 'mixing' sliders.
• Chromatic aberration (3)This is a lens aberration that produces color fringing around the outlines of objects near the edges of the picture. It’s very hard to eradicate completely from lens designs without making them extremely complex or expensive, but it is possible to correct chromatic aberration using software and many cameras will now correct JPEGs in camera.
• Clarity (9) 'Clarity' is a localised contrast adjustment much coarser than regular sharpening, which throws larger objects into sharp relief and can add some much needed definition and 'bite' to low-contrast scenes.
• Cloning (1)Using a special clone stamp tool to copy pixels from a nearby area of an image to cover up an unwanted object or blemish. Cloning is something of an art, and some programs now offer simpler ‘content aware’ object removal.
• Cloud storage (10)Where you store or share images online as well as or instead of storing them on your computer. Cloud storage offers the advantage that your images are accessible everywhere as long as you have an Internet connection, though displaying and downloading images is of course slower than opening them on a hard drive, and uploading images in the first place is slower still. Examples include Apple iCloud, Dropbox and Google Drive.
• CMYK (1)This is a color model used in printing processes, where colors are defined in terms of cyan, magenta, yellow and black color channels (black is represented by the letter ‘K’). Desktop printers use CMYK inks but carry out the conversion from regular RGB photos automatically. In commercial printing, a designer will convert a regular RGB photo to CMYK to check the color rendition and prepare it for printing.
• Collection (2)Lightroom‘s name for Albums, its ‘virtual’ image containers. Some programs call them ‘albums’, but the terms ‘album’ and ‘collection’ are generally interchangeable. You use Collections to bring together related images with actually changing their location on your hard disk.
• Color adjustment (9)A good term to describe the HSL (hue, saturation, lightness) adjustments provided in many image-editors. You can use these to change the appearance of specific colors in an image while leaving the rest unaltered.
• Color Balance (Capture One) (1)
• Color Editor (Capture One) (1)
• Color Efex Pro (Nik Collection) (3)A software plug in that’s part of the DxO Nik collection. Color Efex Pro offers a huge variety of preset image effects you can browse through and apply to your photos with a single click, but you can also adjust the filters manually and even stack them to create custom ‘recipes’. Color Efex Pro also offers localised adjustments via ‘control points’.
• Color management (2)For designers and professional photographers it’s often important to maintain consistent color rendition from the camera, through the computer display used for browsing and editing and right to the final output device, generally a printer. Colour management tools use software ‘profiles’ and hardware monitor calibration and printer calibration devices to try to ensure this consistency of color. It’s a complex process, and when images are going to be displayed on a screen rather than being printed, you have no control over the color rendition of the output device. Many photographers don’t use color management.
• Color model (1)This is the system used by computers and other digital devices for defining colors. In photography, the RGB system is almost universal – colors are defined using red, green and blue color ‘channels’. In printing, it’s CMYK, or cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Some image-editing processes use Lab mode, which consists of a ‘lightness’ channel and two (‘a’, ‘b’) color channels.
• Color space (1)Different devices can’t always display the same range of colors, so your camera may be able to record a wider range of colors than your computer monitor or tablet can display, for example – in other words, the monitor offers a smaller ‘color space’. To get round this, there are two main RGB color spaces you can work on. The sRGB color space is a smaller, universal color space that practically any device can match. Adobe RGB is a larger color space that your camera and printing systems can capture but your monitor probably can’t, which means some complex workarounds and pitfalls and really needs a switch to a more complex color managed workflow. sRGB is the simplest solution, and (though some will debate this) you’re unlikely to see any real advantage to Adobe RGB in everyday photography.
• Composition (3)This is the art, or skill, of arranging the objects, perspective and framing of a photograph to achieve the desired visual effect. There are a number of 'rules' of composition, including the rule of thirds, the Golden Mean and various other photographic truisms that may or may not prove useful.
• Compression (2)A software process that reduces the storage space taken up by photo or video image files. It comes in two type: ‘lossless’ and ‘lossy’ compression. Lossless compression is used by TIFF files, for example and retains all the image data but does not produce the biggest savings. Lossy compression is used for the JPEG format and produces much smaller files, but some data is lost in the process – though this may not be visible in real-world viewing conditions.
• Contrast (8)Contrast, in its simplest sense, is the different in brightness between two tone. In photography it's usually taken to mean the brightness range of a picture – the difference in brightness between the brightest and darkest parts of a picture.
• Control Line (DxO) (1)This is a new type of local adjustment tool introduced by DxO into its PhotoLab and Nik Collection software. You can think of it as being like a linear gradient tool but with an eyedropper to select the color and tonal range you want the adjustment to target.
• Control point (7)A special selection and adjustment tool used by the Nik Collection plug-ins and DxO PhotoLab, control points operate over an adjustable circular radius and select only tones similar to the area under the central target. You can use them to adjust Brightness, Contrast, Structure, Saturation and more.
• Copyright (2)You own the copyright in any photo you take, though if you photograph a model or an important building, you may not have the right to use your photos commercially without their permission (or ‘release’). Some cameras can embed copyright information.
• Corner shading (7)'Corner shading' is another term for vignetting, where the image created by the camera lens is darker in the corners because of light fall-off. It's often corrected in-camera, but can also be fixed in software which applies digital lens corrections tailored to each lens.
• Creative Cloud (Adobe) (5)Adobe’s online image sharing, storage, synchronisation and collaboration service. Many of Adobe’s workflow tools now rely on its Creative Cloud services.
• Cropping (7)There are two main reasons for cropping photos, one creative, one practical. You may want to crop out unwanted objects near the edges of the picture, or you may need to crop it to fit different print sizes and aspect ratios.
• Culling (7)Culling is the process of deleting unwanted images from a shooting session, either because they have technical problems, they are duplicates or near-duplicates, or because they're simply not good enough to keep.
• Curves (12)Curves are one of the most fundamental image adjustment tools in photo editing software. They're used to shift different parts of the picture's tonal range to make them darker or lighter, though they can also be used for color adjustments.