Photo Editing Terms 4 - M to R

Megabyte
A megabyte is generally about a million bytes, or a thousand kilobytes. Technically, a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes.

Megapixel
A megapixel is one million pixels, or dots. Megapixels are the de facto standard for measuring the power of a digital camera. Generally speaking, a four megapixel image can be printed at about 5x7 or perhaps even 8x10 without making the pixels so large it ruins the picture.

Memory Stick (R)
One brand of digital camera media. It looks like a small stick of chewing gum.

Online Photo Printing
Online Printers are Internet companies that allow their members to upload pictures for printing. Once the prints are done, the company then mails them to the customer.

Panning
Panning the camera involves following a moving subject while snapping the picture. Done properly, the subject will be sharp and the background behind it will be blurry. This technique can be duplicated by using a radial blur on the background in a photo editing application.

Photochopping
Also Photoshopping. Digitally altering a familiar photograph into a visual joke of some kind, usually by merging two pictures (like a shark and a rescue helicopter).

Pixel
Pixel is short for Picture Element, and it's basically a dot. All digital pictures are made up of these dots, and counting them is a measure of the image (pixels per inch, or PPI), print (dots per inch, or DPI), and camera power (millions of pixels or megapixels).

Portrait
The word Portrait actually has two meanings. The first and original is the photography term for a picture of a person. The second meaning is a description of the alignment of a picture. Pictures that are oriented vertically--with the long sides upright--are known as Portrait images, whether they depict a person or not.

RAW
RAW is the internal format of a digital camera. Many cameras " pre-process" images. They will do JPG compression, white balancing, and a number of other adjustments. The RAW image is the starting point for all of these. Digital photographers prefer to start from the RAW file so that they can make their own changes to these items.

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