The process of creating, storing, manipulating, and displaying photographic images through electronic devices such as digital cameras, computers, and printers. By the late 20th century digital technology had largely replaced traditional chemical photographic processes. That digital photographs are easier to produce, manipulate, and distribute than their analogue predecessors has led to significant changes to vernacular, artistic, and commercial photographic practices. The boundaries of what constitutes Photography—once defined quite clearly through its optical and chemical nature—have also expanded, to the point where many question whether digital photography is an incremental step in the evolution of the medium, or a radical leap into an entirely new form of image production.
While a traditional photograph is an image embodied in physical form, a digital photograph exists as a computer file that describes the image. Most digital photographs today are composed of bitmaps, grids filled with numbers that represent the colour and tonal characteristics of each square, which is called a pixel. Most commonly, each pixel is described by three numbers that can range from 0 to 255 (or 2...
