Below is a list of pho­tog­ra­phy terms

we will be adding to this list as we find new terms.

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Aper­ture

The Aper­ture is the size of the open­ing in the cam­era lens at the moment a photo is taken.  Aper­ture is mea­sured in frac­tions, so the larger the num­ber, the smaller the aper­ture open­ing.  Shut­ter speed and aper­ture are the two pri­mary con­trols for lim­it­ing the amount of light that hits the film or sensor.

Appli­ca­tion

An Appli­ca­tion is just another word for com­puter program.

APS-C For­mat

Refers to size of the dig­i­tal cam­era sen­sor. With Nikon’s  DX or APS-C for­mat sen­sor size is about 23.5 x 15.5mm and has a lens mul­ti­plier num­ber of 1.5. This makes a 200mm lens equal to a 300mm lens in 35mm for­mat equiv­a­lent. Math exam­ple — 200mm * 1.5 = 300mm.

Browser

A Browser is an appli­ca­tion that allows the pho­tog­ra­pher to sort and rename the pic­tures in his or her collection.

Burn­ing

Burn­ing means dark­en­ing part of a pho­to­graph.  In the dark­room, it’s done by block­ing some of the light that would nor­mally reach the rest of the photo.  In dig­i­tal photo edit­ing, it’s usu­ally a paintbrush-like tool built into the application.

CD

Com­pact Disks are the typ­i­cal means of stor­ing dig­i­tal pho­tographs.  They hold about 700 megabytes of infor­ma­tion, and can be CD-R for write­able CDs and CD-RW for re-writeable CDs.

Cloning

Cloning is an image edit­ing term for copy­ing one part of the image into another part of the same image or a dif­fer­ent image entirely.  It’s used for paint­ing out unwanted items, like elec­tric lines.

CMYK

CMYK is an acronym for Cyan, Magenta, Yel­low, Black.  These are the four col­ors used in the stan­dard print­ing process.  It’s also a color mode in photo edit­ing programs.

Com­pact Flash

Com­pact Flash is one form of dig­i­tal cam­era media.  It was the orig­i­nal stan­dard, and is still one of the most com­mon for­mats. It has a capac­ity that starts at 2MB to a max­i­mum capac­ity of 128GB.

Crop­ping

Crop­ping involves chop­ping out part of a pic­ture.  You might crop to focus atten­tion on the real sub­ject, or to remove extra stuff that intruded on the picture.

DVD

When it comes to stor­ing dig­i­tal pic­tures, a DVD is basi­cally a monster-sized CD.  It will hold over four and a half giga­bytes of data.

Dodg­ing

Dodg­ing is mak­ing a sec­tion of a photo lighter.  When this is done in the dark­room, it’s usu­ally by block­ing some of the light from reach­ing that part of the pic­ture.  In a photo edit­ing pro­gram, it’s a paint­brush like tool that light­ens instead of painting.

Down­load

Down­load­ing is the oppo­site of upload­ing.  Down­load­ing means to pull data from another loca­tion.  Nor­mally it means to get data from the Inter­net, but in dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy, it also means to get the pic­tures from the cam­era.  Some­times used inter­change­ably with Importing.

DPI

Most photo print­ers and mon­i­tors mea­sure their res­o­lu­tion in Dots Per Inch, or DPI.  The higher the num­ber, the higher the resolution.

EXIF

EXIF stands for Exchange­able Image For­mat.  Most dig­i­tal images have two parts.  The first is the image itself, which is usu­ally stored as a JPG image.  The sec­ond is the EXIF data.  EXIF data most often includes all of the photographer’s infor­ma­tion, like the date and time the pic­ture was taken and the shut­ter speed and aper­ture set at the time.

Flip

Flip­ping an image is the same as reflect­ing it in a mir­ror.  Flip­ping is one of the basic image edit­ing tools.

F-Stop

Com­ming soon

Full Frame Format

Refers to size of the dig­i­tal cam­era sen­sor. The Nikon FX or Full Frame For­mat sen­sor size is about 26 x 24mm or about the same size as 35mm film.

Grayscale

Tech­ni­cally speak­ing, a spec­trum of gray shades from black to white.  A grayscale pic­ture is the dig­i­tal equiv­a­lent of a black and white photo.

HDR

Com­ming soon

High­lights

The High­lights are the whitest part of a pic­ture.  Nor­mally, they are a very small per­cent­age of the pic­ture, because it’s very easy to lose details in highlights.

His­togram

A His­togram is a chart that graphs all of the tones in a photo.  Most pro­grams will gen­er­ate his­tograms, and most dig­i­tal cam­eras can cre­ate them also.

Hue

Com­ming soon

Image File Format

The for­mat of an image file deter­mines the size of the file, the over­all image qual­ity, and sev­eral other things.  Com­mon image file for­mats are JPG, GIF, TIFF, and PNG.

Image Res­o­lu­tion

The Res­o­lu­tion is the num­ber of pix­els, or dots, in a picture.

Inkjet Printer

An Inkjet printer sprays tiny jets of ink onto paper.

ISO

The sen­si­tiv­ity of film is mea­sured by ISO, and the larger the num­ber, the more sen­stive the film.  ISO 100 needs a lot of light, like out­doors on a sunny day.  ISO 1600 doesn’t need much light.  How­ever, higher ISO means more grain in the film.  Dig­i­tal images bor­rowed the ISO scale to mea­sure the sen­si­tiv­ity of a cam­era sen­sor.  Just like the grain that’s added to film at higher ISO set­tings, more “noise” is added to dig­i­tal images at higher ISO.  In gen­eral, as ISO goes up, qual­ity goes down.

JPG or JPEG

The Joint Pho­to­graphic Experts Group devel­oped a method for mak­ing dig­i­tal images smaller while sac­ri­fic­ing only a lit­tle bit of qual­ity in the process.  This is called JPG com­pres­sion, and is the most com­mon pic­ture for­mat on the Internet.

Land­scape

The word land­scape, like por­trait, actu­ally has two mean­ings.  The first and orig­i­nal is the pho­tog­ra­phy term for a pic­ture of wide open spaces, like a moun­tain or sun­set.  The sec­ond mean­ing is a descrip­tion of the align­ment of a pic­ture.  Pic­tures that are ori­ented horizontally–with the nar­row sides upright–are known as Land­scape images, whether they depict a moun­tain or not.

Lay­ers

Think of Lay­ers as sheets of trac­ing paper or trans­parency film laid over top of your image.  Graphic design­ers use lay­ers to sep­a­rate out ele­ments of their project, so that they can work on indi­vid­ual pieces with­out dam­ag­ing oth­ers.  Adjust­ment Lay­ers are a spe­cial kind of layer that shows the results of what­ever fil­ter or func­tion is attached to that layer.

Lumi­nance

Com­ming soon

Media

Media is a tech­ni­cal term for stor­age.  Com­pact disks, DVD’s, mem­ory cards, thumb dieves, are all stor­age media.  Remove­able media is a mem­ory cards, thumb dieves, or disk that can be moved from one com­puter to another with­out los­ing data.

Megabyte

A megabyte is gen­er­ally about a mil­lion bytes, or a thou­sand kilo­bytes.  Tech­ni­cally, a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes.

Megapixel

A megapixel is one mil­lion pix­els, or dots.  Megapix­els are the de facto stan­dard for mea­sur­ing the power of a dig­i­tal cam­era.  Gen­er­ally speak­ing, a four megapixel image can be printed at about 5x7 or per­haps even 8x10 with­out mak­ing the pix­els so large it ruins the pic­ture. How­ever a 12 megapixel or 24 megapixel can pro­duce a much larger qual­ity print, but lens qual­ity plays a more impor­tant roll with large prints.

Mem­ory Stick ®

One brand of dig­i­tal cam­era media.  It looks like a small stick of chew­ing gum.

Online Photo Printing

Online Print­ers are Inter­net com­pa­nies that allow their mem­bers to upload pic­tures for print­ing.  Once the prints are done, the com­pany then mails them to the customer.

Pan­ning

Pan­ning the cam­era involves fol­low­ing a mov­ing sub­ject while snap­ping the pic­ture.  Done prop­erly, the sub­ject will be sharp and the back­ground behind it will be blurry.  This tech­nique can be dupli­cated by using a radial blur on the back­ground in a photo edit­ing application.

Pixel

Pixel is short for Pic­ture Ele­ment, and it’s basi­cally a dot.  All dig­i­tal pic­tures are made up of these dots, and count­ing them is a mea­sure of the image (pix­els per inch, or PPI), print (dots per inch, or DPI), and cam­era power (mil­lions of pix­els or megapixels).

Plug-in

Plug-ins are small or large pro­grams that can be added to a pro­gram appli­ca­tion like Pho­to­shop or Light­room to enhance the capa­bil­ity of the appli­ca­tion. The­ses plug-ins are usu­ally cre­ated by a third party company.

Por­trait

The word Por­trait actu­ally has two mean­ings.  The first and orig­i­nal is the pho­tog­ra­phy term for a pic­ture of a per­son.  The sec­ond mean­ing is a descrip­tion of the align­ment of a pic­ture.  Pic­tures that are ori­ented vertically–with the long sides upright–are known as Por­trait images, whether they depict a per­son or not.

RAW

RAW is the inter­nal for­mat of a dig­i­tal cam­era.  Many cam­eras “pre-process” images.  They will do JPG com­pres­sion, white bal­anc­ing, and a num­ber of other adjust­ments.  The RAW image is the start­ing point for all of these.  Dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phers pre­fer to start from the RAW file so that they can make their own changes to these items.

Red Eye

Red Eye is the reflec­tion of the cam­era flash off of the back of the subject’s eyes.  It hap­pens most often with a bright flash in dim light.  Many photo edit­ing appli­ca­tions have red eye removal features.

Resize

Resize is one of the basic photo edit­ing tools.  It’s used to change the size or res­o­lu­tion of an image.

RGB

RGB is the stan­dard color for­mat for dig­i­tal images.  It stands for Red, Green, Blue.  Each of the three col­ors is given an amount between 0 and 255, and the blend of the three pro­duces all of the other col­ors.  Three zeroes pro­duce white, and three 255s pro­duce black.

Rotate

Rota­tion is one of the basic photo edit­ing tools, and is com­monly used to fix por­traits that have been down­loaded from the cam­era as landscape.

Sat­u­ra­tion

Sat­u­ra­tion is a mea­sure of the rich­ness of the col­ors in a photo.  When a pic­ture is desat­u­rated, all of the color infor­ma­tion has been removed, and what’s left is a grayscale or black and white picture.

Shad­ows

The shad­ows are the dark­est part of an image, just as high­lights are the brightest.

Shar­ing

Shar­ing pho­tos gen­er­ally involves upload­ing them to a web­site (like Flickr) so that other peo­ple can view them or even order prints and photo gifts.

Sharp­ness

Sharp­ness is a descrip­tion of the focus and clar­ity of a pic­ture.  It con­cerns how clearly the details appear to be.

SD or Secure Digital

One ver­sions of dig­i­tal cam­era media card that can sup­port a max­i­mum capac­ity of 2GB.

SDHC or Secure Dig­i­tal High Capacity

One ver­sions of dig­i­tal cam­era media cards that sup­port a max­i­mum capac­ity of 32GB. Some older cam­eras do not sup­port this format.

SDXC or Secure Dig­i­tal Extended Capacity

One ver­sions of dig­i­tal cam­era media cards that sup­port a max­i­mum capac­ity of 2TB. Only some of the newest cam­eras sup­port this for­mat as of 2010.

Shut­ter Speed

Shut­ter Speed is the amount of time the shut­ter remains open when a photo is taken.  Shut­ter Speed and Aper­ture together deter­mine just how much light hits the film or cam­era sen­sor.  The shut­ter speed is also a frac­tion, just like the aper­ture.  A shut­ter speed of 500 is actu­ally 1/500, or “one five hun­dredth of a second.”

Smart Media ™

One of the sev­eral ver­sions of dig­i­tal cam­era media.

Thumb Drive

A Thumb Drive is one name for a USB Flash Chip.  Other nick­names are Jump Drive and USB Key­chain. The Thumb Drive comes in var­i­ous sizes, like 1mb to 16mb and higher that plugs into a computer’s USB port.  It’s like hav­ing a pocket hard drive.

Thumb­nail

A Thumb­nail is a small ver­sion of a larger pic­ture.  Many brows­ing and edit­ing pro­grams use thumb­nails to index a pic­ture col­lec­tion.  Some pro­grams will even gen­er­ate Con­tact Sheets, which are basi­cally page after page of thumb­nails show­ing the entire col­lec­tion or directory.

Upload­ing

Upload­ing is the oppo­site of down­load­ing.  Upload­ing involves send­ing a file from your com­puter to another sys­tem, either through a cable or over the Internet.

USB

USB stands for Uni­ver­sal Ser­ial Bus.  It’s an indus­try stan­dard for con­nect­ing things to com­put­ers.  Most dig­i­tal cam­eras and chip read­ers use a USB cable to con­nect to the com­puter.  USB 2.0 is a newer and faster stan­dard, most com­puter can han­dle the 2.0.

White Bal­ance

White Bal­ance is a cam­era set­ting used to com­pen­sate for changes in the color of light.  Some arti­fi­cial lights “tint” the color they project, so the camera’s white bal­ance set­ting is used to bal­ance this back to a more nor­mal color cast.  If the camera’s white bal­ance was incor­rect, then the photo edi­tor has to account for this by chang­ing the color scale.  The pro­gram will use an area that was sup­posed to be white as the start­ing point, and will remap every other color in the pic­ture accordingly.

Wiz­ard

A Wiz­ard in com­puter terms is a pro­gram that walks you through a process step by step.  For exam­ple, a scan­ning wiz­ard might ask a series of ques­tions on color vs. black and white, auto­matic scratch removal, and image res­o­lu­tion, before it actu­ally trig­gers the scanner.

This is a list in progress. We will be adding to this list as we find new terms.  You can help make this a more com­plete list. If you have a term that is relates to pho­tog­ra­phy. Please leave a com­ment related to pho­tog­ra­phy terms. (SPAM will not be approved) Thank You Doug

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