Digital Cameras

Today’s scanners capture transparencies, reflective images, or illustrations and express them as pixels. But now we’re undergoing another revolution. High-end digital cameras now rival—or exceed—the ability of film-based cameras to capture photographic detail. The image captured by the camera is a digital original, so there’s no need to scan a print. Of course, the better the camera and the photographer, the better the image. Your mobile phone isn’t up to the job.

While conventional camera film—such as 35mm transparencies—must be scanned to be used on your computer, digital camera images can be downloaded directly to the computer and used immediately. Digital photography also cuts out the middleman. Unlike film images, digital images don’t have any grain, but an image photographed at low light may tax the resolving capabilities of a digital camera and thus exhibit digital noise.

Consumer point-and-shoot cameras deliver captured images as JPEG, a compressed format. There are degrees of compression, from gentle to aggressive, and you may never notice any visible artifacts betraying the compression. But higher level “prosumer” cameras and professional digital cameras can deliver images in the Camera RAW format, which is subjected to minimal (or no) compression by the camera. While you cannot place a RAW file directly into Illustrator or InDesign, RAW images can be opened directly in Photoshop and saved in another format, such as Photoshop PSD.

In addition to benefiting from minimal compression, RAW files can be color corrected in the Photoshop Camera RAW environment without losing additional information. For example, an image shot under daylight conditions but with the camera’s white balance set to fluorescent lighting, can be corrected with one click in the Camera RAW environment without the loss of information that would occur in a Levels or Curves correction.

Camera RAW is a powerful and flexible format; RAW images also take up more space on the camera’s memory card, but the advantages are worth the extra heft.