Basics of Digital Darkroom

A digital photographer’s darkroom is a place where all the post processing of his photographs are done in order to get the final finish which brings out the best of his photographs. You may have great photo gears and expensive camera and lenses that may take great photos but without a good post processing, your photos may not look its best. However, it is unfortunate that many photographers don’t pay good attention in creating a good digital darkroom or post processing set up. There are few simple steps you can follow, few simple techniques you need to learn and apply and few items including software you need to source in order to create an effective and creative digital darkroom.

In order to set up a digital darkroom, you need to allocate a space first. You don’t need a big space for that. An extra spare room in your home, a corner of your living room or a portion of your home office can serve the purpose. Get a table, a comfortable chair and a storage rack to begin with. It will also be better if you can install neutral color curtains to cover the source of lights and make sure to paint the wall in neutral colors as well. Having neutral colors as the base room color will create less destruction and will help you focus on your computer monitor. Your table should preferably of L shaped or at least have some extra space to keep a photo printer and some extra stuff like your Camera(s) and notepads and other related accessories. Keep an extra folding chair just in case you need to have someone to work with you.

Now the most important piece of hardware you need is a Computer. Does not matter if you use PC or Mac, but you need to make sure that you buy a decent piece of hardware with a high resolution Monitor (preferably High Definition one.). Monitor size should be 17″ and above allowing you to work with large format photographs. I found Dell ultra sharp monitors or Apple cinema displays as excellent choices. You may also have bigger sized laptops to do the work; however I won’t recommend that as you may find your big and bulky laptop difficult to carry around to your shooting locations. What you may also do is, use an external monitor and attach it to your laptop when you work in your darkroom.

Your laptop or computer should have a dual core or higher processor and at least 3GB RAM, decent graphic card and 320GB or higher storage space. Also get a decent photo printer to be able to print regular sized photos. I like Epson as my preferred brand for this; however you choose whatever you like based on your budget and requirement.

Next thing you need is a storage rack to store your CDs/DVDs, Photo Gears, Books etc. Get a simple rack with locking feature to safely store your work and gears.

You also will have to get one or two external hard drives to copy your photos from your computer and a CD/DVD burner to copy your photos in CD/DVD to keep as backup and also to give to your clients. I also suggest you buy an external memory card reader in order to download your photos to your Computer faster. Other thing you may need is few markers, CD/DVD sleeves, a table lamp or floor lamp and good speakers. Also make sure to have surge protectors and UPS in order to have uninterrupted power supply during your work.

Let’s look at the software side of your darkroom. First of all, you need image management and manipulation software. The first name comes to our mind is Adobe Photoshop. However, I must say that you really don’t need to have Photoshop as your primary image management software. Photoshop is rather meant for professional graphic designers and digital artists. I would like to recommend another software from Adobe which is called Lightroom. It is more effective, far cheaper and easier software than Photoshop and this is more than what you need. Lightroom is more of an image management program with strong editing functions and a great raw conversion and editing program. Though Lightroom’s photo editing is not as strong as Photoshop, but Lightroom does offer a lot in its editing and for many it will be all you ever need. But for photo only editing and correction, Lightroom is the way to go and of course you can use Photoshop as well if you want to.

Oh I forgot to mention that if you shoot RAW, then you must use a RAW conversion and editing program. If your Camera has RAW capability, it will come with RAW conversion software and it will also have some RAW manipulation capability. You may also try to use Lightroom for RAW conversion and manipulation. Stepok’s Raw Importer is a free and easy-to-use raw importing and converting tool, compatible with most camera models on markets. With the help of this tool, you can convert camera RAW files into best quality JPEG or TIFF format step by step. It supports batch converting! http://www.stepok.net/eng/raw_importer.htm

HDR or High Dynamic Range photography is a new trend which many Photographers want to set their foot into. There are many HDR software available. The one I like and would like to recommend is Photomatix. You may also do some research to find the most suitable HDR software for you.

Digital photographic files are really a subset of a much larger group of files called computer graphic files. And this group is really quite large. Perhaps the best authoritative text on computer graphics files is a big book called ‘The Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats’. Also published by O’Reilly; this reference book will give you the skinny on the differences between JPEG, TIFF, BMP, etc. It’s more of a ‘nice to have on hand’ type book. And it will definitely help you to think accurately about the file types it describes.

If you have followed the above steps, then you are all set. Now start your journey. Few last things I must say are, calibrate your monitor, wear a neutral color outfit to minimize the interference with the monitor and be creative but don’t over manipulate your photos. So enjoy and wish you all the best.