Changes with Digital Photography

We believe that this is an exciting time as people start using digital images instead of traditional photographs and slides. The following paragraphs describe some of the changes that we see happening.

Traditional Imaging - Photographs and Slides

Until digital cameras and computers became popular, people would take their own photographs or slides on vacations and special occasions, like birthdays. Photographs taken by professionals would be used to make postcards, in magazine articles, and in advertisements in magazines and on billboards. Ordinary people would hire professional photographers for only one occasion, weddings.

In all these cases, the photos were viewed as a whole. The scene chosen by the photographer was the scene that everyone looked at. Sometimes people would look deeper into a photograph to try to make out small details, but rarely would someone use a magnifying glass when looking at a photograph, and non-professionals who were not hobbyists hardly ever tried to have a new photograph made by magnifying a portion of an existing photograph.

Television documentaries, such as the PBS documentaries by Ken Burns, found a different way to view photographs. Rather than displaying a single image of an old photograph for 30 seconds while a television narrator describes its contents, documentaries zoom in on a part of a photograph, pan around as it is described, and then zoom out at the end to present the big picture captured in the photograph. In this way, many images can be found in a single photograph.

Digital Imaging is Changing the Ways that People Use Images

Today, with digital cameras that can produce large images, computers that can edit and view them, color printers that can print them, and the Internet that can make it easy to share images with others, the ways that people use images are changing. Software is becoming available to help people do things that they never did with photographs and slides.

If people just want to view most of their digital images on computer screens, there is almost no cost to taking each image, so people can take more pictures than they could before, they can take them more often, instead of only on special occasions, and they can easily share copies of the images with everyone in them. The result is that people will have many more images to look at and save, and many software companies are working on ways to help people organize their images, find images in their collection, and share their images with others.

Since color printers are common, people can print out images at home, and software is needed to make it easy for people to have the colors of their printed images match the colors displayed on their computer screen. This software depends on standards developed by computer and printer hardware manufacturers. It is still hard to get the colors to turn out right, but things are improving, so it should become easier to get the colors to match in the years to come.

Software is enabling professionals and novices to adjust image properties, like brightness, color, and contrast, and to combine parts of multiple images to make new images that do not reflect reality. Software can be used to "stitch" a group of images taken from the same location together to make a panorama. Some image-editing software can be very easy to use, while other image-editing software can be very complicated.

The images that most digital cameras capture are too large to be displayed at one time on most computer monitors, so it may become more common for people to zoom and pan around images to see additional details when viewing them. Indeed, the best way to view panoramas is to zoom in on a part of the whole image and pan and zoom around to look at other parts. It still isn't common for people to pan and zoom when viewing non-panoramic images, possibly because most software for viewing images either reduces images to fit on the screen or uses scroll bars instead of the mouse to pan around images.

Some software for viewing panoramas, like QuickTime, supports links from parts of images to other content. Currently, links are used to learn more about objects in images and to navigate between images to create "interactive-tours". At this time, links are added manually. In the future, links may become common when viewing images, there may be other uses of links that become common, and some links might be added automatically by software.

Another future imaging technology is 3-D Modeling. With enough images of an object or a room, a 3-D model can be produced that can be viewed on a computer from any angle. Future software will make it easier for people to create 3-D models from images and explore environments filled with 3-D models.

Finally, it should be noted that video can be thought of as a sequence of related images. When people start working with digital video on their computers, they will start to be able to do things that they never did with traditional video tapes.