Photographic Terms: A - L
Adjustment Layer: A magical way to edit your photograph without changing the original image. In a darkroom, when you make a change, you can only do it to the original photo you’re printing. But with some photo editing software, you can make an almost unlimited number of copies of your image. They’re all stacked on top of each other, in “layers”. And each layer has a single change made to it, like contrast or saturation. Each is called an Adjustment Layer. When viewed from above, the image you see combines all the changes from each layer. Even better, you can “turn off” a single layer, and see what it looks like to remove one of your changes. And you can “mask” portions of each layer. It’s a wondrous thing.
Anti-aliasing: Removing the tiny jagged edges in the curved lines of your digital images. Your digital photo is made of millions of tiny pixels. They’re square. Squares don’t make good curves. Corners stick out. Anti-aliasing smoothes out these corners so curves look even, not jagged. Cindy Crawford thanks you.
Backlit/Backlighting When the strongest light in your image comes from behind your subject. Usually that means your subject is a silhouette and you can’t see much detail on them because they’re darker than the surrounding light. You can defeat backlighting by using fill-flash.
Bokeh: Blur. When the subject of your piccie is sharp and in focus, and everything else is out of focus, the out-of-focus stuff is called bokeh. It happens when you set your lens to have a narrow “depth-of-field”. It’s a great way to draw attention to your subject. Bokeh is a Japanese word that means fool. As in “to fool”. I hope.
Brightness: The amount of light your image is putting out, or reflecting. The overall lightness of your piccie. A well-exposed photo has good brightness, without being overexposed. Also, think of the color in your image as being broken down into three components – brightness, saturation and hue.
Burning and Dodging: Lingo from the old darkroom days. Dodge means to make a portion of your shot brighter. Burn means to make a portion of your image darker. Can be applied to Shadows, Midtones and Highlights.
Camera Shake: Ever tried to keep your hands steady after an all-night bender? Camera shake is what happens when you hold your camera with those trembling hands. It’s a major cause of blurry photographs, especially in low light conditions.
CCD/CMOS: Types of digital camera sensors. CCD is a Charge Coupled Device. CMOS is Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor. Aren’t you glad you asked?
Center Weighted: Just what it sounds like – an exposure setting for your camera that gives priority to the light levels in the center of your frame. They get priority as the camera decides the best exposure for your shot. If the important stuff in your shot isn’t in the center, you shouldn’t be using enter weighted metering.
Chimp: If you’re so in love with your photography that you spend a lot of time reviewing your images in the camera’s monitor, grab a banana, because you’re “chimping.”
Chromatic Aberration/Purple Fringing: 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.
CMOS/CCD: Types of digital camera sensors. CCD is a Charge Coupled Device. CMOS is Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor. Aren’t you glad you asked?
Cold/Warm: 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.
Color Cast: When the colors in your image don’t look like they should, when they have a tint. If your grass seems too red, for example, then you have a warm or red color cast. Usually this happens when your camera has the wrong white balance.
Color Profile: Computers are dumb. They need to be told how to handle color. The instructions are called a “color profile.” Because life is complicated, there is more than one kind of color profile in the world. Each has its own uses. It’s a good thing to know what color profile your camera and your software are using, when you post-process your images.
Color Temperature: This is how the color spectrum in light is measured. It’s the actual temperature of different colors in light, as measured in degrees Kelvin. Red and blue are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Red is considered warm and blue is considered cold. The higher the color temperature, the more light is being put out.
Compact Flash: A memory card used to store digital images in your camera.
Composition: It’s what you decide to include inside the frame of your picture. Composition is the order in which those things are arranged, their relationship to each other. The human eye finds some visual relationships more pleasing and interesting than others. Check out the “golden ratio” – it’s fascinating stuff.
Contrast: Having distinct bright and dark portions in your image. As opposed to a more uniform, or grey, lightness. The brighter the brights and the darker the darks, the more contrast you have. Contrast is generally considered a good thing, makes your shot “pop.”
Crop: Literally, cut off a part of your image. Imagine taking a pair of scissors and snipping off parts of a photo print. Usually done to help the composition or to remove distracting elements.
Crop Factor: Most digital camera sensors are smaller than 35mm film. Because they’re smaller they capture less of the image that’s coming through the lens. This reduction is known as a “crop factor.” This is because it looks just like the image has been cropped. This cropping is sometimes mistakenly called a “magnification factor” as well. It’s a mistake to use this term, because the image is not magnified, only cropped. This cropping makes lenses appear to have longer focal lengths.
Desaturation/Saturation: 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.
Depth of Field: The amount of your image that is in focus. All lenses are capable of putting everything in focus. But you can make some lenses put only a small part of your overall image in focus. This is called a narrow depth of field. You need a lens that has a long focal length and a wide aperture to get the narrowest depth of field. Here’s the technical language for it: “The amount of distance between the nearest and farthest objects that appear in acceptably sharp focus in your photograph. Depth of field depends on the size of the aperture, the distance of the camera from the subject, and the focal length of the lens. The bigger the aperture, the greater the depth of field.”
Dynamic Range: Your camera’s ability to handle a wide range of light, from bright to dark, in the same image. Digital cameras have a narrow dynamic range, far more narrow than film used to make prints. That is to say, they have a hard time handling extremes of darkness and brightness in the same picture. For example, bright sunlight with a deep, dark shadow.
Evaluative Metering: Canon’s name for a meter that uses the zone system to give you a correct exposure. Also known as a Matrix meter in Nikon 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.
Exposure: How much light has been allowed into the camera to make your image. Underexposed means you let in too little light and everything’s too dark. Overexposed means you let in too much light and everything’s too bright. Digital cameras don’t have as much dynamic range as film and so are more sensitive to over- and under-exposure.
Feathering: Making a sharp edge seem softer in your image. Usually used when making a selection in post-production. You often soften its edge so your selection blends-in more gradually with the background.
Fill Flash: Using a flash in daylight to fill-in the shadows, or when your subject is backlit. It lights the shadows and reduces contrast.
Filter: A way to add effects to your photograph. With SLR cameras you can put a filter in front of the lens to get an effect. The people who make photo editing software have taken the same concept and gone wild with it. You can make your photo blurry, make it sharp, distort it, all sorts of whacky things.
Fisheye Lens: A super wide angle lens that gives almost a 180-degree view. It also has an almost limitless depth of field.
Focal Length: Oh boy, this is the one the math folks love and the rest of us dread. Focal length is the distance between the film or digital sensor and the optical center of the lens when the lens is focused on infinity. The focal length of the lens on most adjustable cameras is marked in millimeters on the lens mount. Got that? Yeah, me too. In 35mm-format cameras, lenses with a focal length of approx. 50mm are called normal or standard lenses. Lenses with a focal length less than approx. 35mm are called wide angle lenses, and lenses with a focal length more than approx. 85mm are called telephoto lenses. Lenses which allow the user to continuously vary the focal length without changing focus are called zoom lenses. These numbers are skewed with most digital cameras, which have sensors smaller than 35mm film and have what is called a Crop Factor.
Full Frame Sensor: A full frame sensor is approximately the same size as 35mm film. There is no “crop factor” in the image. All lenses are true to their focal lengths. This makes folks with wide angle lenses very happy, as they get a true wide angle image.
Golden Ratio: This is literally a mathematical formula that describes shapes that the human eye finds pleasing. For example, the shape of Cindy Crawford’s face matches the golden ratio. Lucky her. You can use the golden ratio to organize the elements of your photograph into a pleasing assemblage. Literally, the golden ratio is 1.61803, or the ratio of a diagonal of a pentagon to its side. Huh?
Gamut: The number of colors your eye can make out is your eye’s color gamut. Gamut = range. Your eye is the top dog when it comes to color gamut. Your camera, your computer monitor, your software, your printer – they all have their own color gamut, or range. And all of them are more limited than your eye’s. All hail the human eye.
Gaussian Blur: Makes your image blurrier, or out-of-focus, usually for dramatic effect. Imagine holding a piece of gauze in front of your eyes. It makes what you’re looking at a little blurry. If it doesn’t, go see your eye doctor. You can get the same effect with computer software in post-production. Most programs have a filter called Gaussian blur, that allow you to control the amount of blur. By the way, Gaussian has nothing to do with gauze – it’s actually a math thing. And therefore incomprehensible.
Highlights: The brightest, lightest 30% of your image. The relationship between your shadows, midtones and highlights constitutes the contrast of your photo.
Histogram: A handy graph that shows you how the light in your image is distributed, from light to dark. It will also show you if you’ve exceeded your image’s dynamic range. Digital SLR’s can show you a histogram for each photo, so you can adjust your exposure while you’re shooting. Good photo editing software does too, so you can better control your photo’s brightness and contrast.
Hot: Jargon for over-exposed. A portion of your piccie is “hot” if it’s so bright it’s white and you can’t see any detail in it. This is the worst sin you can commit – you cannot recover detail from a hot, or overexposed, portion of your image. This is where “RAW” and “histograms” come to your rescue.
Image Stabilization: The ability of a lens or camera to compensate for your shaking hands and give you a sharp picture. It can only do so much. But it’s extremely helpful with lenses that have a long focal length and therefore readily show any camera shake.
Incident Light Meter: The light meters in your camera try to measure how much light is over there, on your subject. But there’s another kind of meter. This one measure the amount of light over here, right where the meter itself is. It typically has a small white dome and is called an Incident Meter. You walk over to the place you want to photograph, hold up the meter and measure the light. Put on a beret and they’ll think you’re a movie director.
ISO: A measurement of film sensitivity. Now it’s a measure of your digital sensor’s sensitivity to light. Digital cameras have a range of ISO settings. Higher ISO settings increase the sensor’s sensitivity so you can shoot in low light. But high ISO’s can also introduce noise into your shot.
Jpeg/jpg: A format for storing your images. Jpegs are compressed versions of your image – in other words, some information is removed in order to make a smaller file. Jpeg stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. It’s the most common format for a digital photograph. Jpeg is “lossy’ which means that when you open up the file it has lost some of the original information.
Kelvin: A scale for measuring light temperature.
Layers: A magical way to edit your photograph without changing the original image. In a darkroom, when you make a change, you can only do it to the original photo you’re printing. But with some photo editing software, you can make an almost unlimited number of copies of your image. They’re all stacked on top of each other, in “layers”. And each layer has a single change made to it, like contrast or saturation. Each is called an Adjustment Layer. When viewed from above, the image you see combines all the changes from each layer. Even better, you can “turn off” a single layer, and see what it looks like to remove one of your changes. And you can “mask” portions of each layer. It’s a wondrous thing.
Anti-aliasing: Removing the tiny jagged edges in the curved lines of your digital images. Your digital photo is made of millions of tiny pixels. They’re square. Squares don’t make good curves. Corners stick out. Anti-aliasing smoothes out these corners so curves look even, not jagged. Cindy Crawford thanks you.
Backlit/Backlighting When the strongest light in your image comes from behind your subject. Usually that means your subject is a silhouette and you can’t see much detail on them because they’re darker than the surrounding light. You can defeat backlighting by using fill-flash.
Bokeh: Blur. When the subject of your piccie is sharp and in focus, and everything else is out of focus, the out-of-focus stuff is called bokeh. It happens when you set your lens to have a narrow “depth-of-field”. It’s a great way to draw attention to your subject. Bokeh is a Japanese word that means fool. As in “to fool”. I hope.
Brightness: The amount of light your image is putting out, or reflecting. The overall lightness of your piccie. A well-exposed photo has good brightness, without being overexposed. Also, think of the color in your image as being broken down into three components – brightness, saturation and hue.
Burning and Dodging: Lingo from the old darkroom days. Dodge means to make a portion of your shot brighter. Burn means to make a portion of your image darker. Can be applied to Shadows, Midtones and Highlights.
Camera Shake: Ever tried to keep your hands steady after an all-night bender? Camera shake is what happens when you hold your camera with those trembling hands. It’s a major cause of blurry photographs, especially in low light conditions.
CCD/CMOS: Types of digital camera sensors. CCD is a Charge Coupled Device. CMOS is Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor. Aren’t you glad you asked?
Center Weighted: Just what it sounds like – an exposure setting for your camera that gives priority to the light levels in the center of your frame. They get priority as the camera decides the best exposure for your shot. If the important stuff in your shot isn’t in the center, you shouldn’t be using enter weighted metering.
Chimp: If you’re so in love with your photography that you spend a lot of time reviewing your images in the camera’s monitor, grab a banana, because you’re “chimping.”
Chromatic Aberration/Purple Fringing: 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.
CMOS/CCD: Types of digital camera sensors. CCD is a Charge Coupled Device. CMOS is Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor. Aren’t you glad you asked?
Cold/Warm: 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.
Color Cast: When the colors in your image don’t look like they should, when they have a tint. If your grass seems too red, for example, then you have a warm or red color cast. Usually this happens when your camera has the wrong white balance.
Color Profile: Computers are dumb. They need to be told how to handle color. The instructions are called a “color profile.” Because life is complicated, there is more than one kind of color profile in the world. Each has its own uses. It’s a good thing to know what color profile your camera and your software are using, when you post-process your images.
Color Temperature: This is how the color spectrum in light is measured. It’s the actual temperature of different colors in light, as measured in degrees Kelvin. Red and blue are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Red is considered warm and blue is considered cold. The higher the color temperature, the more light is being put out.
Compact Flash: A memory card used to store digital images in your camera.
Composition: It’s what you decide to include inside the frame of your picture. Composition is the order in which those things are arranged, their relationship to each other. The human eye finds some visual relationships more pleasing and interesting than others. Check out the “golden ratio” – it’s fascinating stuff.
Contrast: Having distinct bright and dark portions in your image. As opposed to a more uniform, or grey, lightness. The brighter the brights and the darker the darks, the more contrast you have. Contrast is generally considered a good thing, makes your shot “pop.”
Crop: Literally, cut off a part of your image. Imagine taking a pair of scissors and snipping off parts of a photo print. Usually done to help the composition or to remove distracting elements.
Crop Factor: Most digital camera sensors are smaller than 35mm film. Because they’re smaller they capture less of the image that’s coming through the lens. This reduction is known as a “crop factor.” This is because it looks just like the image has been cropped. This cropping is sometimes mistakenly called a “magnification factor” as well. It’s a mistake to use this term, because the image is not magnified, only cropped. This cropping makes lenses appear to have longer focal lengths.
Desaturation/Saturation: 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.
Depth of Field: The amount of your image that is in focus. All lenses are capable of putting everything in focus. But you can make some lenses put only a small part of your overall image in focus. This is called a narrow depth of field. You need a lens that has a long focal length and a wide aperture to get the narrowest depth of field. Here’s the technical language for it: “The amount of distance between the nearest and farthest objects that appear in acceptably sharp focus in your photograph. Depth of field depends on the size of the aperture, the distance of the camera from the subject, and the focal length of the lens. The bigger the aperture, the greater the depth of field.”
Dynamic Range: Your camera’s ability to handle a wide range of light, from bright to dark, in the same image. Digital cameras have a narrow dynamic range, far more narrow than film used to make prints. That is to say, they have a hard time handling extremes of darkness and brightness in the same picture. For example, bright sunlight with a deep, dark shadow.
Evaluative Metering: Canon’s name for a meter that uses the zone system to give you a correct exposure. Also known as a Matrix meter in Nikon 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.
Exposure: How much light has been allowed into the camera to make your image. Underexposed means you let in too little light and everything’s too dark. Overexposed means you let in too much light and everything’s too bright. Digital cameras don’t have as much dynamic range as film and so are more sensitive to over- and under-exposure.
Feathering: Making a sharp edge seem softer in your image. Usually used when making a selection in post-production. You often soften its edge so your selection blends-in more gradually with the background.
Fill Flash: Using a flash in daylight to fill-in the shadows, or when your subject is backlit. It lights the shadows and reduces contrast.
Filter: A way to add effects to your photograph. With SLR cameras you can put a filter in front of the lens to get an effect. The people who make photo editing software have taken the same concept and gone wild with it. You can make your photo blurry, make it sharp, distort it, all sorts of whacky things.
Fisheye Lens: A super wide angle lens that gives almost a 180-degree view. It also has an almost limitless depth of field.
Focal Length: Oh boy, this is the one the math folks love and the rest of us dread. Focal length is the distance between the film or digital sensor and the optical center of the lens when the lens is focused on infinity. The focal length of the lens on most adjustable cameras is marked in millimeters on the lens mount. Got that? Yeah, me too. In 35mm-format cameras, lenses with a focal length of approx. 50mm are called normal or standard lenses. Lenses with a focal length less than approx. 35mm are called wide angle lenses, and lenses with a focal length more than approx. 85mm are called telephoto lenses. Lenses which allow the user to continuously vary the focal length without changing focus are called zoom lenses. These numbers are skewed with most digital cameras, which have sensors smaller than 35mm film and have what is called a Crop Factor.
Full Frame Sensor: A full frame sensor is approximately the same size as 35mm film. There is no “crop factor” in the image. All lenses are true to their focal lengths. This makes folks with wide angle lenses very happy, as they get a true wide angle image.
Golden Ratio: This is literally a mathematical formula that describes shapes that the human eye finds pleasing. For example, the shape of Cindy Crawford’s face matches the golden ratio. Lucky her. You can use the golden ratio to organize the elements of your photograph into a pleasing assemblage. Literally, the golden ratio is 1.61803, or the ratio of a diagonal of a pentagon to its side. Huh?
Gamut: The number of colors your eye can make out is your eye’s color gamut. Gamut = range. Your eye is the top dog when it comes to color gamut. Your camera, your computer monitor, your software, your printer – they all have their own color gamut, or range. And all of them are more limited than your eye’s. All hail the human eye.
Gaussian Blur: Makes your image blurrier, or out-of-focus, usually for dramatic effect. Imagine holding a piece of gauze in front of your eyes. It makes what you’re looking at a little blurry. If it doesn’t, go see your eye doctor. You can get the same effect with computer software in post-production. Most programs have a filter called Gaussian blur, that allow you to control the amount of blur. By the way, Gaussian has nothing to do with gauze – it’s actually a math thing. And therefore incomprehensible.
Highlights: The brightest, lightest 30% of your image. The relationship between your shadows, midtones and highlights constitutes the contrast of your photo.
Histogram: A handy graph that shows you how the light in your image is distributed, from light to dark. It will also show you if you’ve exceeded your image’s dynamic range. Digital SLR’s can show you a histogram for each photo, so you can adjust your exposure while you’re shooting. Good photo editing software does too, so you can better control your photo’s brightness and contrast.
Hot: Jargon for over-exposed. A portion of your piccie is “hot” if it’s so bright it’s white and you can’t see any detail in it. This is the worst sin you can commit – you cannot recover detail from a hot, or overexposed, portion of your image. This is where “RAW” and “histograms” come to your rescue.
Image Stabilization: The ability of a lens or camera to compensate for your shaking hands and give you a sharp picture. It can only do so much. But it’s extremely helpful with lenses that have a long focal length and therefore readily show any camera shake.
Incident Light Meter: The light meters in your camera try to measure how much light is over there, on your subject. But there’s another kind of meter. This one measure the amount of light over here, right where the meter itself is. It typically has a small white dome and is called an Incident Meter. You walk over to the place you want to photograph, hold up the meter and measure the light. Put on a beret and they’ll think you’re a movie director.
ISO: A measurement of film sensitivity. Now it’s a measure of your digital sensor’s sensitivity to light. Digital cameras have a range of ISO settings. Higher ISO settings increase the sensor’s sensitivity so you can shoot in low light. But high ISO’s can also introduce noise into your shot.
Jpeg/jpg: A format for storing your images. Jpegs are compressed versions of your image – in other words, some information is removed in order to make a smaller file. Jpeg stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. It’s the most common format for a digital photograph. Jpeg is “lossy’ which means that when you open up the file it has lost some of the original information.
Kelvin: A scale for measuring light temperature.
Layers: A magical way to edit your photograph without changing the original image. In a darkroom, when you make a change, you can only do it to the original photo you’re printing. But with some photo editing software, you can make an almost unlimited number of copies of your image. They’re all stacked on top of each other, in “layers”. And each layer has a single change made to it, like contrast or saturation. Each is called an Adjustment Layer. When viewed from above, the image you see combines all the changes from each layer. Even better, you can “turn off” a single layer, and see what it looks like to remove one of your changes. And you can “mask” portions of each layer. It’s a wondrous thing.
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