Image development

Note : This page has been translated into English from French by a machine translation tool

You have probably already heard about image processing, even if it was only many years ago with silver photography, which required you to take your photographic films to a service provider to obtain printed photos. But the term has not completely disappeared with digital photography, since it is still used to refer to the printing of digital photographs in paper format, a process that is becoming increasingly rare as more and more of us are storing our pictures on digital media in order to take them with us more easily everywhere. The ever-increasing memory capacities on our smartphones and the advent of online storage also known as the Cloud, as proposed by Microsoft with OneDrive for example, have largely contributed to this.

But for those who wish to go that far, developing your images is much simpler than it was in the past, thanks to the performances reached today by consumer printers but also to the photo printing terminals that can be found everywhere, including in supermarkets and hypermarkets. The real advantage is to be able to develop photos from home. As long as you have a suitable printer, compatible with photo print cartridges, and good quality paper to feed it, you will get a result that we can describe as very good. Only in cases where you wish to make large format prints in order to hang your most beautiful works on the wall of your living room, will you probably need to hire the services of a professional.

But before you get there, you’ll need to go through the post-production stage, sometimes called photo retouching or processing. This is a set of processes that allow you to correct defects in the appearance of an image or modify the image output from your camera’s sensor, which sometimes lacks visual appeal. To correct the defects, it is possible, thanks to specialized software, to apply predefined corrections to attenuate or remove the effects of image distortion or chromatic aberrations. In order to improve the output image of your sensor and obtain the desired rendering, you can then act on the contrasts, the clarity of the image or the temperature and color saturation.

But it is possible to go even further by simply modifying the content of your image, for example by duplicating certain components of a photograph or, conversely, by deleting them altogether in order to highlight some of them as well as to get rid of elements resulting from an unfavorable configuration compared to the desired rendering. Removing an unwanted part of your image can also be done by cropping. Nothing prevents you from resizing it as well. Be careful however, resizing in the direction of enlargement will inevitably alter the quality of your image. You should therefore use it sparingly. Finally, depending on the desired result and what your image will be used for (print, web display, distribution on social networks, …), you can also choose to apply a rotation to your picture. Your only limits will be those of your imagination.

If you want to know more about the part concerning the treatment of your image, we invite you to read our article You are or want to become a photographer… Why do you need processing software ? to learn more. You will also find a quick overview of the software that will allow you to perform the operations mentioned here and links to the articles that detail their features more precisely.