On vacation I was showing my sis how to remove specks from a photo using photoshop.

"You touch up your photos?"

I wasn't sure if she was serious or not, but in case anyone else is curious the answer is a resounding YES! Not only that, I think everyone should, especially anyone with a digital camera. Photoshop is probably overkill for most uses, but iPhoto comes free with a new Mac and does a pretty good job. Better yet buy Adobe Elements, it's under a hundred bucks and has most of the useful tools from photoshop, a nice file organizer, and a user friendly interface.

If you are appalled at the idea of touching up photos I ask you to take a quick side trip here and tell me what color JoAnn Pflug really is. A bit of an extreme example but you can find the same thing browsing flikr or any online photo gallery.

Here's a simplified outline of how a digital camera works:

1. lens aperture is opened, light is focused on an electronic sensor
2. sensor cells measure shades of gray
3. in front of each cell is a color filter
4. the camera "knows" which sensor represents the shade of gray for a particular "color" cell
5. an onboard computer constructs a color image based on these readings
6. the computer also tries to determine the white balance (what color white is in the current lighting) and adjusts the image accordingly
7. more processing takes place to tweak sharpness and other characteristics
8. the image is turned into a JPEG, using some level of lossy compression
9. image is saved to compact flash card

What you get in the end is the camera's best guess of what the photo should be given all of the dial settings, defaults, lighting, and built in algorithms. Hardly an exact replica. By the time you get the photo onto your computer the "photo bits" have been twiddled so much that they ought to have rounded corners from wear!

A good photo editing program is essential, since it lets you adjust the picture to look the way you saw it. Ideally you'd learn as much about your camera as possible so that it captures the image this way in the first place, but that's not always do-able. Mistakes happen. The more options on the camera the better chance you'll forget one of them and end up with a folder full of blue toned images. Do you throw them away or adjust the white balance? Even film needs help from time to time.

And then there's artistic license, the ability to change the photo to be what you want it to look like, which may not be anything like reality. In the top photo I punched the sky up a bit, adding definition, but leaving the sandy beach alone. In the small photo I lightened and sharpened a bit more to make the kite guy visible.

Speaking of touch-ups: I should remove the person growing out of the guy's head.