Want to walk on water? No problem
By Roopinder Singh

SOON your memories will be reduced to a series of zeros and ones, and let alone having any objection to it, you will actually encourage it, ask for it. No, this is not a surrealistic vision of reality, but a realistic assessment of what is happening around us. Digital photography is moving at a steady clip away from the esoteric confines of professionals to ordinary people, even in India.

Most of the photographs that we see printed have been digitised, as have most of the big, attractive displays that dominate skyscapes in metropolitan cities. A 12-foot-high and 30-foot-long translite photograph of Takht Sri Kesgarh Sahib, taken by a Chandigarh-based photographer, is on display at Anandpur Sahib. It is said to be India’s largest photographic image. This feat was achieved by using the hybrid process combining the best of conventional photography with digital processing. Soon, it seems the trend will invade our homes and our family albums.

What exactly is digital photography? Traditionally, the darkroom side of photography has been associated with chemistry and chemical processes (in so far as the making and processing of photographs involving various chemical processes is concerned). When you replace these with electronic processing, you get digital photography.

"The biggest thing in the past 10 years has been auto-focus, which is increasingly being accepted by professionals as well. Digital will be the most important development of the coming 10 years," says Hoshang S. Billimoria, Acting Editor, Better Photography magazine

To discuss digital photography a bit more technically, you can acquire a digital image, (which is a series of ones and zeros in machine language) in either of two ways: either you take a photograph with a digital camera, or you convert a film-image to digital format using a scanner.

In digital cameras, unlike conventional cameras, the image is recorded through light-sensitive silicon picture elements, or pixels, that convert it into electrical impulses, which are recorded in the camera’s electronic memory. On a film, the image is recorded through light-sensitive silver-halide crystals, which are then developed chemically. The image on film is in analog form — it can’t be directly stored or manipulated in a computer. Silicon chips, on the other hand, record the image in digital form so that the image can be stored and manipulated in a computer.

Naturally, the more the pixels, the better the resolution, and the more the cost of the camera. Megapixel cameras (which have at least 1000 pixels on the long side of the image) cost much more than ordinary ones. The pixels are neatly laid out on a charge-coupled device (CCD), which is an expensive electronic gadget.

In general, we have to remember that even this seemingly impressive figure of megapixels does not compare with film, which has hundreds of million crystals. The limited range and number of pixels means that the digital image is only an approximate representation of the subject.

Except for some specialised, time-sensitive applications like photojournalism, it is difficult to justify the cost of such machines, typically around Rs 6 lakh or more.

"The best solution, if you are computer crazy, is to take a photograph with a film camera, use a digital scanner to digitise the photograph, use computer software to manipulate it, and print it any way you want to," says Billimoria.

For most of us, this hybrid approach is the route to digital photography. You combine conventional cameras with either film or print scanner to digitise the images so that they can be manipulated and optimised in the computer. The finished files can be printed digitally on a colour printer or sent out to be printed photographically. This way you do not have to spend money on a digital camera and still get the benefits of digitisation.

"In the Indian context, photographers will not be comfortable shifting to a brand new medium (digital). It is a smart move by the manufacturers to strike a midway solution between the print and digital media.

In traditional photography you get what you see, if you record it correctly; whereas in the digital side, there is more scope for correction/manipulation. You can treat it as an advantage as well as a disadvantage, you can have the kind of images you require, though they may not be ‘true’ images," says Manas Dewan, a photojournalist with Better Photography.

You may ask what is it that digital imaging can do for you. Well, it can easily take care of exposure problems (if the image is overall too dark or bright); contrast issues (bright areas are too bright as compared to the dark areas in the image, a problem common in photographs taken with flash); overall colour cast problems (your picture has a tinge of a particular colour), or improve dull, lacklustre colour.

The key word here is ‘ease.’ These very problems can also be tackled using the traditional chemical processes, but often the time spent and the cost can be quite high. What neither of these processes can do is turn you into a better photographer, or fix blurry images caused by poor camera focus or camera shake.

What has made digital imaging very popular with people is the way in which images can be manipulated in computers, using image editing software like PhotoShop. It is this which makes it very easy do image editing and remove blemishes in photographs, adding things to them, combining them and, at times, manipulating them in various ways.

It’s easy to fix red-eye, to remove phone wires from house photos, and even to put blue skies into the picture. "You can do much more in digital photography than in traditional photography. For example, if you retouch a traditional black and white photograph, you are limited by the original in the kind of colouring you can do, whereas in digital photography, you can give realistic skin tones to the photograph," says Parkash, a Bombay-based digital photography specialist, who works for a company which develops customised software for India.

"With our software, you just pick up the skin tone from the many options we have and paste it there. You can mix different types of photographs and use any size of images, and you can use a machine to go up to 50" width and any length in the high end processing machines available in India. The input, however, has to be very good. 12"x18" prints on photo paper," he adds.

At the PhotoAsia exhibition, which was held in Delhi recently, there were many vendors exhibiting wares combining digital and traditional photography. Among the interesting things on display was a software programme that enables a person to colour a black and white photo, manipulate it and even combine more than one photo. This is said to be quite popular in small towns.

This kind of software, which does not require much technical knowledge, is what is required for low-end use of small studios. Often people have faded or even torn black and white photographs of their elders. These can be converted into fairly realistic coloured images and a print given without too much cost (between Rs 300 and Rs 500), according to one vendor.

Once the changes have been made in image editing software, the next step is storing the photographs. This is most often done on the hard disk drive of a computer, though some people may require portable media for taking such files to other locations.

Often the images form very large files and compression software is used to make the files small. A programme that applies a set of complex calculations (called algorithms by the technicians) performs compression to a file to make it smaller. The compression program basically squashes the information in a file so that it can be stored in a smaller space, and can later be de-compressed back to its original size. Of course, if a picture-file is compressed too much, you cannot re-create exactly the same scene with the same image quality as in the original. It is generally believed that a compression ratio of more than 10:1 causes loss of image quality. JPEGs (pronounced JAY-pegs) and GIFs and TIFFs (both rhyme with "stiffs") are common programmes (algorithms) that can be used to save the image and, possibly, provide compression.

A transition from the digital mode to the physical one (your picture looks good on the computer but you want to have it in your hands) is the last step. For this, the photos can be printed out on inkjet printers, which give quite a good resolution, specially when it is printed on special paper that is meant for photographs.

At the higher end are the continuous tone printers, which give a better result, at a much higher cost.

Of course, for the really demanding customers, there are the digital laser writers. With such machines, it is now possible to "write" continuous tone, true photographic quality digital images on films, negatives or slides, which can then be enlarged on conventional enlargers/printers, to produce brilliant colour pictures, prints or transparency materials. In other words, you get the best of both the worlds, the clarity of conventional photography and the image-enhancement capabilities of digital photography. Such a marriage of the two technologies is what most professionals are placing their bet on.

Photography has a long way to go as far as growth in our country is concerned. "Over the years in India, the industry has been stifled because of inordinately high duties, with the result that the entire trade was under the carpet, in the grey market. The potential, however, is huge," says Billimoria. He quotes some statistics: "In India, only 21 per cent of the urban households have one camera per household, the figure drops down to 4 per cent in rural areas. In Japan, it is 250 per cent. That means that in a household of four people, they would have 2.5 cameras. This shows how much more we have to travel. We consume about 75 million rolls of film; Japan, which is a tiny country, consumes 400 million rolls. Then, the only way we can go is up."

Now that we have discussed digital photography, you may ask: What is the future of conventional photography?

Think of digital photography and conventional film-and-chemicals photography as parallel technologies rather than as "one-lives, the-other-dies" competing technologies. Digital does certain things better and some not as well. The point to note is that photo manipulation is now within the grasp (and pocket) of mainstream consumers. As far as the eventual prognosis is concerned, we can consider the fact that personal computer servers took years to supplant proprietary minicomputers. PCs used as word processors took years to usurp dedicated word processors. Desktop publishing took years to decimate traditional typesetting. Desktop photography, too, is expected to take a long time to displace traditional photo processing systems. Happy clicking.