Printing, pre-press, publishing and photography services – yesterday, today and tomorrow

Contents:

1. Digital Magic
2. Painting By Numbers
3. A Revealing Image
4. As Easy as Calling Up a Log
5. A Lunar Odyssey
6. Fun with Fuzzy Filters
7. Building Color
8. A Digital Toolbox

A Digital Toolbox

Creating color photos by combining three black-and-white images is one more technique borrowed from the world of conventional photography. With film negatives, however, it can take hours of fussing in the darkroom. With a computer, building a color composite takes mere minutes. (See "Going Digital in Color," July 1992 Astronomy, for more details.)

Like sharpening and contrast stretching, color compositing is one of the tools now available to users of image-processing software. None of these techniques is used alone. Getting the most out of digital images involves a combination of these and other tools of the digital darkroom.

And more powerful techniques are coming. New affordable programs are on the horizon that will bring to the amateur astronomer tools similar to the software being used to sharpen images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Amateurs will soon be able to extract every pixel of detail from their original images. All of this, thanks to the digital darkroom.

Richard Berry