Top Questions about Digital Photo Editing

  • What is Stock Photography?

    Stock photography is licensed art and images taken and provided by professional photographers.
  • What is the Rule of Thirds?

    The Rule of Thirds is a theory that divides an image into a 3x3 grid. The subject must align with the focal point where the guidelines intersect.
  • What is an Aspect Ratio?

    Aspect ratio refers to the proportional relationship between the width and height of a frame reduced to the smallest ratio. The aspect ratio is written as the width then height and separated by a colon (width:height).
  • What does it mean when an image is Blown Out?

    Images are blown out when a photo is overexposed to light and appears too bright or white.
  • What is Bokeh?

    Bokeh is a blur or haze created when lights are out of focus.
  • What does it mean to Crop an image?

    Crop is the process of removing unwanted portions of an image either digitally or manually.
  • What is Exposure?

    Exposure is the amount of light on photo subjects. Overexposed means there's too much light whereas underexposed means there's not enough light.
  • What does it mean to Flatten an image?

    Flatten means merging all visible layers into one to reduce the file size.
  • What are Highlights?

    Highlights are the lightest parts of a photo.
  • What is Knolling?

    Knolling, also known as 'flat lay photography', is a photography technique when objects are arranged at a 90-degree angle within a square or rectangular frame and shot overhead.
  • What are Layers?

    Layers are a transparent overlay stacked to create images and effects.
  • What are Levels?

    Levels are the highlights, shadows and mid-tones in a photo.
  • What are Mid-Tones?

    Mid-tones are the areas between the lightest part, or highlights, and darkest part, or shadows of a photo.
  • What is Noise?

    Noise is spots or specks on a photo that appear dirty or dusty. Removing the dots is called noise reduction.
  • What is Resize and Resample?

    Resize means to change an image size by duplicating pixels. Resizing may pixilate images and look blurry.
    Resample means to change an image size by filling in more pixels.
  • What are Shadows?

    Shadows are the darkest parts of a photo.
  • What is Unsharpening an image?

    Unsharp is a tool to sharpen an image by creating a blurry, or unsharp copy and subtracting it from the original.
  • What is 2K?

    2K is a term that refers to a horizontal resolution of 2,000 pixels in images and screens.
  • What is 4K DCI?

    4K DCI is similar to 4K UHD, however 4K DCI refers to an image or digital screen with a resolution of 4096x2160 pixels. 4K DCI refers to an aspect ratio of 1.9:1.
  • What is 4K UHD?

    Similar to 4K DCI, 4K UHD refers to images or digital screens with resolutions equal to 3840x2160. 4K UHD is equal to a 16:9 aspect ratio.
  • What is 720p?

    720p, often referred to as "HD Ready" refers to digital screens and images with an aspect ratio of 16:9 and with 720 horizontal progressive lines.
  • What is 1080p?

    Similar to 720p, 1080p refers to images or digital screens with an aspect ratio of 16:9 that have 1080 horizontal lines that are non-interlaced (I.e. progressive).
  • What is 1080i?

    Images and digital screens with 1080 horizontal lines and whose lines are interlaced (not progressive) are considered to be 1080i.
  • What is Aliasing?

    Aliasing refers to the process of minimizing or removing completely jagged/sharp edges in a digital photograph, making affected areas appear smooth and natural.
  • What is an Artifact?

    An artifact is any distortion in a digital image created as a result of interpolation or image compression.
  • What is a Bit?

    A bit is a binary digit that is considered to be the absolute smallest unit available when referring to a digital file. 8-bits is equal to one byte.
  • What is Color Calibration?

    Color calibration is the process where image source, monitor and printer can be calibrated to use the same color standard. Examples of color calibration standards are Adobe RGB and sRGB.
  • What is Color Depth?

    Color depth refers to the number of colors that are represented by hardware such as a monitor or camera and software such as bit-depth of a computer user's desktop.
  • What is Dynamic Range?

    Dynamic range is the range of brightness and tonality reproduced within a digital image. The wider a dynamic range the greater the tonal values between dark shadows and highlights.
  • What is Interlaced Scan?

    Interlaced scan, or video, is a commonly used term to describe video capture techniques where two fields of data are captured a frame apart and then played back in a manner that reproduces motion without flicker.
  • What are Jaggies?

    Jaggies is a common term to describe the 'stair-step' appearance of angled lines in a digital image.
  • What is a Kilobyte?

    A kilobyte (kb) is 1,024 bytes and is used to describe the size of a digital image or file.
  • What is LCD?

    LCD refers to the technology used in displays and stands for 'liquid crystal display'.
  • What is a Megabyte?

    A megabyte (mb) is 1,024 kilobytes and is used to describe the size of a digital image or file. A typical digital image file size is usually measured in megabytes.
  • What is a Megapixel?

    A megapixel represents 1,000,000 pixels and is the unit of measure used in describing the sensor's size of a digital camera.
  • What is OLED?

    OLED stands for organic light emitting diode and is a type of LED that does not require any back lighting.