Photography

Like many other things, photography has been deeply affected by computers. Photographs now can be taken by cameras that do not even use film. Instead they use electronic sensors to measure light intensities and translate them into digital code that can be read by a computer. The computer translates the digital code into a grid of points, each assigned a number that represents a color (or level of gray for black-and-white photos). The process is similar to the way in which music is translated into digital form when it is put on a compact disc.

Once digitized, images can be manipulated by computers in many of the same ways they can be changed while making prints in a darkroom. But because digital images are essentially a series of numbers, they can be manipulated in other ways as well. For publishing purposes, digital images can be converted to halftones by the computer, making the process easier and faster. As a result, many newspapers, magazines and advertising firms have switched to digital photography for increasing amounts of their work.