Chapter 6. How Software Manipulates Pixels

How Software Manipulates Pixels

The numbers racket rarely pays off as well as it does in retouching photos—digital photos, that is. For when you’ve shot or scanned a photograph, all those areas of color and light and dark can be assigned a number, several numbers, in fact, for color, position, and hierarchy. Then you’re only a calculator away from improving that picture for an off-color hue here, a touch of red–eye there, or (on the more drastic side) getting rid of irritating relatives entirely.

Practically any operation that can be carried out with photo-editing software starts with the number of some pixel in the photo. If you want ...

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