Photo-editing A-Z

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• Backups (2)It’s extremely important to keep backups of your images, the changes you've made to them and your image organization system. There are backup tools for backing up your entire computer system, selected folders and sub folders, and backup tools built into image cataloguing programs like Lightroom.
• Barrel distortion (4)This is where straight lines near the edge of the picture appear to bow outwards, and you see this a lot with zoom lenses at their wideangle setting. It’s most noticeable if the horizon is near the top or bottom of the picture. Barrel distortion is very difficult to eradicate completely from the lens design, but it can be fixed using software, and some cameras now have distortion correction built in. It’s one of a number of common lens aberrations. Telephoto lenses often show the opposite effect, ‘pincushion distortion’.
• Batch processing (4) Applying the same image adjustments to a whole batch of photos. For example, you might choose a black and white conversion style and apply it to all the photos from a particular shooting session. Batch processing can save a lot of time, but only if all the images will benefit from the same settings.
• Batch rename (2)Batch renaming is a useful feature in Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Bridge, Capture One and other photo editing tools. You can use it to change the naming system for whole folders full of images at a time. One example is changing the filenames created by the camera into something more meaningful for your own filing system.
• Bayer sensor (5)Most camera sensors use a single layer of photosites (pixels). These are only sensitive to light, not color, so a mosaic of red, green and blue filters (the ‘bayer pattern’) is placed on top of the sensor’s photosites so that individually they capture red, green or blue light. When the camera processes the sensor data to produce an image, it ‘demosaics’ the red, green and blue data, using color information from surrounding photosites to ‘interpolate’ full color data for each pixel.
• Bits and bit depth (6)‘Bits’ are the basic building block of digital data, and the more bits of information used in digital images, the subtler the colors and tonal transitions. Bits and pixels are related, in that the greater the ‘bit-depth’ used to create a pixel, the better the quality of the color/tone information in that pixel. Digital cameras typically capture 10, 12 or 14 bits of data for each pixel, and this is then processed down to produce regular JPEG photos (8 bits) or converted into high-quality 16-bit TIFF files.
• Black and white (54) The popularity of black and white photography is increasing. Black and white suits some subjects extremely well, drawing more attention to shapes, lighting and composition than is generally possible with colour photography.
• Black and white filters (5)When you shoot in black and white, the camera or the film is converting different colours into shades of grey. When you use a coloured filter, you’re shifting and changing the brightness of the different colours in the scene, and this changes their shade of grey in the photograph. This is why they’re sometimes called ‘contrast’ filters too. For example, a red filter allows red light through but blocks light of other colours. Anything red in the scene becomes proportionally much brighter, anything opposite to red, like a blue sky, comes out a much darker shade of grey – nearly black, sometimes.
• Blend modes (4)Blend modes are used to control the way different layers in an image interact, and they apply not just to other image layers but also non-destructive adjustment layers.
• Blur (1)'Blur' is a word that can mean all sorts of different things. You can have blur caused by camera or subject movement, or you can have blur in out of focus areas of the photo. Blur is often used creatively in photo editing to subdue distracting elements in the scene, for example, so that the viewer's attention is focused on the main subject.
• Bokeh (3)'Bokeh' is a Japanese word that describes the particular visual quality of out of focus areas on a picture. Bokeh fans will wax lyrical about the background rendering of certain lenses, while sceptics will wonder what all the fuss is about. It all depends on how sensitive you are to the nuances of images.
• Borders and frames (10)Borders and frames are a great way to 'finish' off a picture for printing or display, and they've come a long way since the unconvincing fake 'wooden' frames (and others) that you get in entry-level programs like Photoshop Elements.
• Bracketing (7)Taking the same shot at a series of different exposures with the intention of choosing the best one later or merging them together to create an HDR image. Most cameras offer an auto exposure bracketing option. You choose the bracketing interval (the difference between the exposures, typically 1EV) and the number of frames (usually 3, sometimes 5 or even 7). Some cameras offer other types of bracketing, e.g. white balance bracketing or even focus bracketing.
• Bridge (Adobe) (6)The folder and file browser used across Adobe's Creative Cloud applications, not just Photoshop. For many photographers, its a simpler and more predictable image organising tool than Lightroom.
• Brilliance AI (1)Brilliance AI is a comparatively new feature in ON1 Photo RAW which uses AI to automatically identify and individually enhance subjects and areas in a scene. It's designed as a one-click photo optimisation tool. • ON1 website • ON1 Photo RAW review
• Browser (photos) (7)Software that can ‘browse’ through the folders on your hard disk and show you any photos inside them as thumbnail images. This is the simplest form of photo organisation tool and works perfectly well for many photographers, even though it lacks flexibility. Adobe Bridge is a file browser, for example, while Alien Skin Exposure and ON1 Photo RAW are examples of photo-editing programs that have browsers built in.
• Brush (2)A simple manual tool for painting color on to an image, making a selection or a mask, or applying an adjustment. You can change the size of the brush, its ‘hardness’ and its flow rate or opacity, all of which can help you adjust the effect and the way it’s built up.
• Burning in (3)An old black and white darkroom technique where areas of a print were given a longer exposure under the enlarger to make them come out darker. Usually you would do this by extending the print exposure while covering up those areas you wanted left alone, either with your hand, a piece of card or a specially shaped 'mask'.
• BW mode (Lightroom) (1)This is an option at the top of the Basic panel in Lightroom's Develop mode. It switches the image to black and white, but it also enables a B&W panel in the adjustments below to change how different colors are rendered as shades of gray.
• BW panel (Lightroom) (1)When you switch to BW mode in Lightroom, the image swaps to black and white but Lightroom also switches the regular Color Mixer panel for a dedicated B&W panel. Here, you can change how different color ranges translate into shades of gray using sliders or a targeted adjustment tool which you drag directly on areas of the image.