Digital darkroom

Digital darkrooms are simply the counterparts of the darkrooms which were created for extracting photos from the camera films of analog cameras. Digital cameras are devoid of films and therefore digital darkrooms are constituted differently. A digital darkroom contains a high performance computer having requisite graphical tools and software applications which will aid in providing good quality pictures. The computers in digital darkrooms have extensively set up monitors and in most cases dual monitors are used for this purpose. Often printers are also present for the photos may be sent by the photographers in different professional laboratories for judging its quality. The computer is supplied with major storage devices as well like FireWire, RAID and USB along with suitable hard drives. At times DVD burners are also present. Image editing modes like Photoshop, Corel etc. are usually loaded into the computer. There is also an open source called The Gimp and it is free though it is not used by photographers because of its complex operational procedures.

Various RAW conversion tools are widely used in image editing like QImage, ufraw, dcraw, digiKam and Bibble which are software applications. Other prominent application tools include F-Spot, Aperture, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, FrontPage, Dreamweaver and Flickr. When it comes to the hardware applications, it is interesting to note that in the very beginning when digital photography and image editing were emerging features, all platforms related to digital photography were considered the private sphere for the Mac. However with the progress of time, Windows has greatly improved in term s of technology and hence they are also used in these darkrooms for editing. However it cannot be denied that Mac is still a leading favorite among the photographers. Most digital darkrooms therefore comprise of three essential elements. These are the three hard drives, one used for scratching or swapping the file, one for the purpose of storing the software and operating system and the final one for the image files.