What's That Mean? Digital Photography Jargon

Ever get confused when someone asks you about photography technique, which we'll call photo-geek speak? We all do. I'm still learning new terms and techniques on a daily basis, and assume most of our readers are, too. Thought I'd start a short list of some of the most often used, then I'll let our two experts expand the list in future posts.

CMYK: Four process colors are used in printing and the varying ratios of these colors make full color print possible. C = Cyan (blue), M = Magenta (red) and Y = Yellow. There's two ways to interpret K. It stands for Key, and it's the last letter in Black. Both end up meaning the same thing. It's the color black.

DPI: This stands for "dots per inch". This is a measure of image resolution. For screen resolution, e-mail and slide shows, you generally see 72 or 96 dpi. For printing, I don't use much lower than 300 dpi. And for super-duper high quality printing and for large format work, the dpi just gets bigger.

Grey Scale: Not the same as black and white, necessarily. That's something I'll leave to the experts to explain. Grey scale images are made up of 256 levels of grey, with 8 bits of data or more per pixel.

JPEG: Stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. The group worked to create a standard method for image compression. Also known as .jpg. Almost all cameras allow you to default to this file format.

Pixel: A single dot on a computer display or in a digital image.

Raw Format (RAW): A RAW image file contains processed data from the image sensor of a camera. It consists of data written to the camera’s memory and needs to be interpreted by specialised software, then re-saved in a normal format, like JPEG or TIFF. Many professionals and adept amateurs prefer working with raw files, before any compression has taken place.

Resample: Resampling changes the resolution of an image. For example, if you have a print quality file, you wwould resample it down to 96 or 72 dpi to post it to a web gallery.

Have any other terms you'd like to discuss? Submit them in our comment section.