Image Errors Lesson Plan

Being able to recognize common errors in images is of great value to you as a professional photographer, as well as anybody working as a picture editor.

As a photographer, learning about common erros helps you to avoid them yourself, but also your knowledge becomes an asset to your employers or to your clients as you can correctly identify problems in images of others - work colleagues, images sourced from picture libraries, images provided by the public and so on. This means you are starting to gain skills expected of a picture editor.

Image errors introduction
Cleaning damage
Colour channels
Interpolation
Over compression
Over sharpening
Posterization
Damaged colour profiles
Printing colour profile errors
Website colour profile errors
Other problems

Image errors introduction

There are many ways that technical faults, file damage and correction errors can appear in images. It is important to be able to identify these problems so that the images can either be corrected, or rejected should the errors be too severe.

LEARN MORE ABOUT IMAGE ERRORS 

Cleaning damage

Errors can be introduced by yourself or others attempting to clean an image and incorrectly using the tools.

LEARN MORE ABOUT CLEANING DAMAGE

Colour channels

Clipping of colour channels is a common error that introduces unreal colours or banding into an image.

LEARN MORE ABOUT CLIPPING COLOUR CHANNELS

Interpolation

Excessive interpolation of an image can introduce recognizable image errors.

LEARN MORE ABOUT INTERPOLATION ERRORS

Over compression

Over compression presents in a number of ways. Being able to recognize them will help you avoid the pitfalls of over compression and enable you to help others.

LEARN MORE ABOUT OVER COMPRESSION

Over sharpening

Over sharpening can be recognized in some distinct ways.

LEARN MORE ABOUT OVER SHARPENING

Posterization

Posterization is recognized by banding and a loss of subtlety and nuances in the transition from one colour to another.

LEARN MORE ABOUT POSTERIZATION

Damaged colour profiles

Damaged colour profiles can result in damage and obscure warnings when you attempt to open the image with the damaged profile.

LEARN MORE ABOUT DAMAGED COLOUR PROFILES

Printing colour profile errors

An inconsistency in colour rendition between the original scene, the digital file and printed versions of the image may indicate a lack of colour profiling or errors in colour profiling.

LEARN MORE ABOUT COLOUR PROFILE ERRORS

Website colour profile errors

Images can look vastly different when placed on the Internet, if not correctly managed.

LEARN MORE ABOUT COLOUR PROFILE ERRORS

Other problems

Other problems you may encounter are discussed here.

LEARN MORE ABOUT OTHER PROBLEMS