The Digital Darkroom
David Hunt - Gray, Tennessee, USA August 31, 2000
Introduction
There is something that has always baffled me about the practice of KAP. Almost no one crops their KAP pictures. This is baffling because one of the first things I learned about photography was that a photographer will crop almost every picture that he takes.
I can see where cropping would be a problem if making prints in a darkroom was the only option. Not many people have color darkrooms at home, and having prints made at a professional photo lab can become expensive for a hobbyist.
Computers have made serious inroads into the photographic darkroom. Many professional photographers don't use the traditional darkroom any longer. Manipulating photographs with image processing software is much easier and faster.
The use of the computer to enhance KAP pictures was briefly touched on by Randy Bollinger in the Aerial Eye (Fall 98, 4:4). Randy created a stunning image of a flying Harris hawk. The camera appeared to be directly above the hawk looking toward the ground. Randy had combined an image of a falconer holding the hawk on his arm with a KAP image where the camera was looking straight down creating what appeared to be a view from above the hawk while it was flying. The possibilities of composite KAP images are limited only by your imagination. In this article I would like to focus on the more traditional uses that image processing software can be put to use.
I do not intend to write a detailed tutorial about the use of any one type of image processing software. I use Photoshop 5, but I am sure that other software packages will perform most of the tasks that I will discuss.