Photo-editing A-Z

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• Panoramas (7)Panoramas are extra-wide images once captured with specially-adapted film cameras but now created digitally by 'stitching' a series of overlapping frames. Some cameras can do this internally but not always at full resolution, and it's more usually to carry out this panorama stitching on a computer.
• Perspective correction (10)Perspective correction is fixing problems like converging verticals in shots of tall buildings and making architectural interiors properly square instead of skewed or tilted. It's different to lens corrections, which are designed to fix lens distortion and other aberrations.
• Perspective Efex (Nik Collection) (1)A relatively new plug-in in the DxO Nik Collection that's designed for precise perspective corrections. It has a lot in common with DxO ViewPoint.
• Photo AI (Topaz) (1)Photo AI is a kind of portmanteau software product which combines Topaz Lab's denoising, sharpening, resizing and portrait enhancement tools into a single semi-automated process. Topaz AI software is highly regarded by many photographers, though it faces strong competition from mainstream rivals.
• Photography Plan (Adobe) (6)A subscription plan which includes Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC. It’s designed for photographers and does offer very good value for money compared to the old scheme, where you paid a much larger amount for a ‘perpetual’ licence, and also had to pay to upgrade to new versions.
• PhotoLab (DxO) (11)DxO PhotoLab is the replacement for the old DxO Optics Pro, adding in local adjustment tools when DxO bought the Nik Collection and its technologies from Google. PhotoLab is now a powerful all image browsing, raw processing, lens correction and editing tool, and is renowned for the image quality it can create.
• Photomerge (Adobe) (1)Image blending technology found in Adobe Photoshop, Elements and Lightroom. It’s used to stitch individual overlapping frames into seamless panoramas, or to merge bracketed exposures into a single HDR (high dynamic range) image.
• Photos (Apple) (1)Apple Photos is the novice-orientated photo organising and editing program supplied as standard with Apple Mac computers and with iOS devices like iPhones and iPads. Your photos are synchronised via Apple iCloud and are available on all your Apple devices.
• Photoshop (Adobe) (2)Rightly regarded as the king of image-editing programs, Photoshop is the most powerful program there is for image enhancement, correction and manipulation, though it does not have the image cataloguing tools or the range of special effects offered by some rivals.
• Photosite (1)The technical term for each individual light receptor on the camera sensor. The light captured by each photosite later goes on to form a single pixel in the digital image, but only after being processed by the camera and/or your photo editing software.
• Picture control/style (3)Cameras usually offer a range of picture ‘styles’ such as ‘Standard’, for neutral results, ‘Vivid’ for richer colors, ‘Portrait’ for gentler tones and more. These are applied to JPEG images saved by the camera. If you shoot RAW files you can choose the picture style later on.
• Pincushion distortion (1)This is where straight lines near the edge of the picture appear to bow inwards. It’s not as common as barrel distortion, but you do see it quite a lot with telephoto zoom lenses when the lens is set to its maximum focal length. You may not notice it with many types of subject, but it can be corrected with software later anyway.
• Plug-ins (7)Plug ins are like add-on programs which work from within your regular software. They provide specialised effects or in-depth tools – or simply a an easier way of working – that aren't part of mainstream photo-editing applications.
• Polygonal lasso (1)A variation of the regular lasso tool where instead of dragging an outline around your subject freehand, you click to add anchor points and work your way around until you get back to the start and you have created a 'polygonal' selection around your subject.
• Portrait enhancement (1)This is a genre of photo editing software that typically uses AI to identify faces and specific facial features in order to carry out targeted adjustments or 'enhancements'. The results can be spectacular, though carried to their extremes they tend to dehumanize individuals and turn them into 'ideals'. This is especially problematic with face- and body-sculpting tools.
• Post crop vignette (1)Normally, if you apply a vignette effect to a photo and then crop the photo you will crop off some of that vignette effect at the edges, too. However, Lightroom‘s ‘post-crop’ vignette will re-apply the vignette settings after the image is cropped so that you don’t lose the effect. Skylum’s Luminar has a Vignette filter which offers both modes – pre-crop and post-crop vignette.
• Presets (20)Presets are specific adjustment settings, or groups of settings, saved for re-use. Presets are used widely by image-editing and effects software to apply a sophisticated set of adjustments to a photo with a single click.
• Preview (1)Large-size rendition of a photo stored by cataloguing or photo browsing software to save time loading up the full size version. Previews are generally large enough to fill the screen but not as large as the original image. They can also sometimes be used for offline editing where the orginal image is on a disk drive not currently connected to the computer, for example – like Adobe Smart Previews.
• Printer profile (1)Used in a color-managed workflow to make sure that the printer reproduces colors exactly as they were on-screen. Profiles for the printer maker's own papers will usually be included in the printer driver software, but third-party printer makers often supply their own own profiles and you can use printer profiling software to make your own.
• Profiles (11)'Profiles' are closely related to LUTS (lookup tables). They adjust the brightness and colour values in an image, sometimes to correct a device's colour rendition (like monitor profiles) but often to apply a creative effect or film simulation.
• PureRAW (3)A raw file 'pre-processing' tool from DxO that applies the company's highly effective lens corrections, raw file demonising and detail recovery process but generates a part-processed linear DNG raw file that can still be edited and processed like regular raw files by other software.