In digital photography artifacts refer to the undesirable modifications caused by the sensor, optics, and internal image processing algorithms of the camera. On low budget compact cameras these artifacts are more visible and easy to identify. On the other hand, top DSLR cameras will require a more careful analysis to identify these artifacts and most of the times they don’t represent a disturbing issue. In this first part we will talk about Blooming, Chromatic Aberrations, Jaggies and JPEG Compression.
Blooming
Every pixel in a digital image is the corespondent value of an electrical charge. This in turn is directly related to the number of photons that will fall on the pixel’s photodiode in time of exposure time. If the exposure time is to long, the electrical charge will reach it’s maximum and will overexpose the corresponding pixel. Blooming occurs when this extra electrical charge affects also the surrounding pixels, causing a loss of details in the photo. Here is an example:

Blooming