Photographic Terms: M - Z

ivarivar Registered Users Posts: 8,395 Major grins
edited May 25, 2011 in Tutorials
Masking: Literally, putting a mask over a part of your image. It’s a technique used in post-production. When you want to change only a part of your image, you “mask” the parts you want to protect. That way your changes are only applied to the parts you don’t mask.


Matrix Metering: Nikon’s name for a meter that uses the zone system to give you a correct exposure. Also known as Evaluative Metering in Canon cameras. The meter breaks your frame down into multiple segments and measures the light in each one. It tries to figure out what you’re shooting, then give you an exposure in which your whites are white, your blacks are black and your greys are grey. Hopefully.


Midtones: The tones that fall between shadows and highlights in your image. No kidding, huh? Roughly, the lightness that makes up the middle 30% - 70% of your image. The relationship between your shadows, midtones and highlights constitutes the contrast of your photo.


Mirror Lock Up: For long exposures, this will reduce any potential vibration caused by the mirror "slapping." Mirror lockup (MLU) raises the mirror, and keeps it there, prior to you firing the shutter.


Noise: Little bits of black, or distortion, or speckling in your shot. Pretty much anything that messes with the crystal clarity of your work of art. In film, it’s the grain of the film showing up. In digital cameras, it most often appears when you push the camera to shoot in low light. It can also appear in long exposures.


Opacity: The degree to which a substance allows light through. The greater the opacity of a substance, the more light it stops. When you’re editing your photo in Layers, you can control the Opacity of each layer. In other words, you can control how much of your edit you allow to be seen.


Overexposure: When you put too much light on your sensor, the image is too bright and detail is lost. This is known as overexposing your shot.


Panorama: Several shots arranged to give a larger perspective than is possible with a single image. Usually the photographer pans their camera along the horizon, taking images that overlap one another. The shots are arranged side-by-side, or Stitched, in the post-production process.


Photoshop/Photoshop Elements: Photo editing/graphics software, made by Adobe. Photoshop is currently the premiere graphics and photo editing software. Photoshop Elements is a simplified (and much less expensive!) version.


Post-production or Post: Work you do to your image after it leaves the camera. With film, it’s what happens in the darkroom. With digital images, you use software in your computer. Photoshop is the current king of the post-production hill. Also known as post-processing.


Purple Fringing/Chromatic Aberration: Some digital camera sensors have a hard time handling sharp contrasts of light – say, a dark branch against a bright sky. When they do, you can see a purple border where the light meets the dark - along the edges of the branches, for example. That’s called chromatic aberration, or purple fringing. You can also get cyan/green fringing and red fringing.


RAW: A way of saving your photo so that the camera does as little processing to the image as possible, before storing it. This gives you a lot of flexibility in post-production to change your photo’s exposure, saturation, sharpness, contrast and more. Normally, your digital camera’s processor will control all of this to make your picture look good. Expensive digital SLR’s give you the option to tell your camera not to.


Red Eye: What happens when a flash is at the same angle as, and close to, your camera lens when you take someone’s picture. Their eyes seem red in the image. Can be fixed in post production. Or by using a flash that’s not as close to the lens.


Reflective Meter: A device that measures light. A reflective meter measures light that is reflected back from the subject. There are three kinds of reflective metering: Spot, Evaluative and Center Weighted.


Resolution: The number of tiny little pixels that make up your digital photo. The more pixels you have in a given space, the more detail you have. Detail is considered a good thing. A lot of people use the words resolution and detail interchangeably.


Rule of Thirds: A guide for photo composition. The rule of thirds says you should divide your frame into thirds, horizontally and vertically. And you should make sure you put the important stuff in your shot, on one of those thirds. See the Golden Ratio.


Saturation/Desaturation: The intensity of the colors in your image. More intense color = more saturation. If you desaturate your image, you are removing the color from it. A black and white image is completely desaturated.


SD Card: A memory card used to store digital images in your camera.


Selection: A tool in your photo editing software that lets you outline, or “select”, a specific part of your image. You can then copy that selection and put it onto another photograph as a layer. For example, you can select a bone from one photograph, and add it to another photograph that shows a happy dog. Or you can make changes only to your selection, leaving the rest of your shot unchanged.


Shadows: The darkest parts of your image. Specifically, the darkest 30% of your shot. The relationship between your shadows, midtones and highlights constitutes the contrast of your photo.


Sharp/Soft: Jargon for in-focus or out-of-focus. Sharp means in focus, all the lines and the detail are sharp. Soft means the opposite, everything looks soft, no sharp edges or detail. You can improve your piccie’s sharpness with “unsharp mask” or make it softer with “Gaussian blur.”


Sharpen: Make the edges of things in an image more distinct. When you sharpen a photo, you make the focus seem clearer, or sharper. You also see detail more clearly. This is a post-production technique. But like coffee can’t cure drunkenness, sharpening can’t cure an out of focus piccie.


Soft/Sharp: Jargon for in-focus or out-of-focus. Sharp means in focus, all the lines and the detail are sharp. Soft means the opposite, everything looks soft, no sharp edges or detail. You can improve your piccie’s sharpness with “unsharp mask” or make it softer with “Gaussian blur.”


Spot Meter: A device that measures light, an exposure meter. A spot meter measures light that is reflected back from a small portion of the subject. It is a very specific measurement.


Stitch: To arrange a series of photographs side-by-side, and/or above-and-below each other, into a single image. Typically a technique used for making panoramas. Stop/Stop Down/f-Stop

A stop is a measurement of the amount of light that is allowed onto the camera’s sensor. The light is controlled by the size of the aperture and the length of the exposure. Stopping down means to allow in less light, either by making the aperture smaller, or by shortening the exposure time. A stop used to refer exclusively to aperture size. A one stop decrease halves the light coming in. A one stop increase doubles the light coming in.


TIFF: A format for storing your images. TIFF stands for Tagged Information File Format. It’s an uncompressed file format. None of your photo’s information is lost as it is stored. This makes for large files. Most image editors can handle TIFFs.


Tone/Tonal Values: This can mean a couple of things. It can mean the color cast of your image – warm tones mean there’s more red in the image, cold tones mean there’s more blue. Check out the definitions for color temperature and white balance. There’s a second meaning, too. Tone can also mean the relative amounts of lightness and darkness of your piccie – the feel of it.


Unsharp Mask: This is the post processing filter you use to make your digital photo sharper. It’s also a perfect example of making things more confusing than they need to be. You’d think they’d call it the “sharpen” filter. But nooooo.


Vignetting: Those dark areas in the corners of your shot. It happens when the light isn’t distributed evenly across your sensor. The far reaches of your frame that get less light. So you get this effect of a circle of light in the middle, with the corners and possibly the edges being darker.


Warm/Cold: An image is considered warm if it tends towards being red. And cold if it tends towards being blue. It all has to do with color temperature and white balance.


Warming Card: A card used to manually White Balance your camera. Normally you would use a white or middle grey colored card to get correct Color Temperatures. But if you want to make your white balance warmer, you can use Warming Cards.


White Balance: A setting in your camera, or in your photo editing software, that makes sure white is displayed as white. When you have white set properly, all other colors in the spectrum will also be correctly displayed. If your image is too warm or too cold, chances are your white balance is wrong.


XD card: A memory card used to store digital photos in the camera. Very small.


Zoom Lens: A lens with a variable Focal Length. You know, zoom in and out.


Zone System: Dumb ol’ camera meters usually try to make everything grey. But by using the zone system, you can make accurate exposures so that snow looks white, instead of grey. The Zone System divides light values into eleven parts, from 0 (black) to 10 (white.) 5 is middle grey. Each zone is the equivalent of an f-stop. Cameras equipped with matrix or evaluative metering are using the zone system. Little bits of black, or distortion, or speckling in your shot. Pretty much anything that messes with the crystal clarity of your work of art. In film, it’s the grain of the film showing up. In digital cameras, it most often appears when you push the camera to shoot in low light. It can also appear in long exposures.
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