Literary Discussions

Nyc Labrets taught me a lot about digital photography. More sophisticated Canon and Nikon cameras can produce a RAW file which is huge in size and is like a NEGATIVE. There is software designed to manipulate that RAW file and do incredible things with the resulting photo. GIMP which is open source has all sorts of 3rd party plugins available. Photoshop can also do things with the RAW file. Youtube probably has many demos regarding this if we search on RAW Gimp. GIMP by the way is totally free. Photoshop costs $800 initially and then $200 per year for updates. GIMP is always a few releases behind Photoshop's ability but many people only use the more elementary functions of those programs. Photoshop implements PANTONE colors which are proprietary. GIMP cannot include anything proprietary and remain open source. Some professionals MUST be able to work with PANTONE numbers and so they must use Photoshop. Nyc told me he has no interest in manipulating RAW files because he wants to shoot as much footage as possible and not strive for some more artistic manipulation of a single shot. This is about as much as I remember of what Nyc taught me and what I learned playing around with GIMP and Youtube tutorials. One concept that is essential is LAYERS. A given GIMP Image can have countless layers which can be transparent or opaque, and one combines layers to achieve the final image. One may edit individual layers. Once you tell GIMP to export to a JPG or other format then they layers are lost as GIMP merges all layers into the final image. Of course you may save your work in a GIMP editable format that preserves all the layers.