The Digital Darkroom
Where The Magic Happens

What is the Digital Darkroom? It can be as simple as a photo printer on the corner of a desk, as elaborate as a Professional Photo Processing Lab or anywhere in between!

Most basic photo quality printers have image editing software included with the printer. Some, like Epson's PictureMate are called "A Photo Lab in a Box! You can lighten or darken the image, crop it to the size you require, convert a color image to black and white or sepia, even do some simple touch up right in the printer.

We carry one of these printers in our van. We use it for field proofs or for sharing pictures around the campfire when shooting JPEG or using our point-and-shoot cameras. The quality of the pictures are as good, if not better, then the prints you get from Wal-Mart and you can see them in just a few minutes!

One drawback to the PictureMate is it does not read Camera RAW files! When shooting in Camera RAW and want to use a small portable printer like the PictureMate, be sure to set your camera's capture function to RAW+JPEG.

Perfect Color

If you are serious about making your images the best they can be, you're going to need alittle more equipment. A calibrated monitor is the cornerstone of any Digital Darkroom. All monitors are different and their performance varies over time. To make critical color decisions and edits, you need a monitor that displays true colors. Buy the best monitor your budget will allow and calibrate it often (at least once a month) for consistant results.

There are many good color calibration systems on the market for you to choose from. We use Color Vision's Spyder2 at the beginning of each week to make sure all of are prints come out looking Great!

Equipment and Software

You'll also need a computer or laptop (PC or Mac), a storage device like an external hard drive for backing up your work and some image editing software. We use PhotoShop CS2, CS3, CorelDRAW X-3, Corel PhotoPaint and AlienSkin BlowUp (for enlargements).

I know CorelDRAW X-3 isn't an image editing program, but it is much easier to break an image into parts in CorelDraw than in PhotoShop CS3. And why would we want to do that? We'll get into that alittle later!

My favorite printer is the Epson Stylus PHOTO R2400. Color reproduction is fantastic, it is fairly fast, will make borderless prints, handles media from 4x6 to 13x19 sheets up to 1.5mm thick, roll paper and Fine Art Canvas.

For smaller prints and photo greeting cards, the HP Photosmart 7960 is a real work horse. We will discuss printers and printing in more detail in How to Print Like A Professional.

Our Digital Darkroom

So what do we have in our Digital Darkroom? We have three PC's, two 20" flat panel monitors and one CRT (used mostly for business software), two laptops (for field work), two 500 Gig external hard drives for backups and storage and four photo quality printers. We also have two regular flatbed scanners and a film and slide scanner (leftovers from when we were shooting film).

No matter how basic or elaborate your darkroom is, the most important thing to remember is to Enjoy Making Prints and Have Fun with your digital photography!

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