Reprinted Articles

Choosing photo-editing software can be difficult. Windows comes with rudimentary tools that will help you with your photos. But you’ll need more if you plan on doing more than resizing and rotating photos. Also, cameras usually come with editing software. However, these probably lack essential features to editing your photos. For the average user, Photoshop is overkill. The learning curve is steep, to say the least. It will allow you to transform a photograph completely. However, its tools are aimed at creative professionals. Even experts struggle to master it! If you have outgrown lesser photo-editing programs, Photoshop may be for you. There are no other programs in the same league. The first thing you should look for is ease of use. Try editing one of your photos. With any program, there will be a learning curve. But, you should be able to find the controls you need fairly easily.

Redeye can ruin an otherwise perfectly good portrait, but there are ways to remove it. Unfortunately some of these methods can remove detail in the eyes and make them look very unusual, even lifeless.The cause of red eye is the flash reflecting from the back of the eye and into the lens. The best thing is to avoid the flash to reflect from the eyes from the very beginning. Red-eye reduction works by having the flash shine a light into the eyes of the subject just prior to the flash/shutter event. This serves to cause the irises in the subject’s eyes to narrow down. The result of this is a smaller opening into the eye for a camera’s eye view of the blood filled retina. Obviously, this would work only if the subject is actually looking at the flash for the pre-light.

At some point or other you’re likely going to want to change the size of a digital photo. This will usually be to serve an intended purpose such as emailing a smaller sized version of your original photo. A common size change for a digital photo is cropping. This can be done to either “zoom in” on a section of the photo (create a new photo of just a portion of the original photo) or to change the aspect ratio of the photo. Cropping involves selecting a portion of the image and removing the rest. This creates a new smaller image with just the portion of the image that you want. Cropping can be used to remove annoyances in the photo, to “zoom-in” on a selected portion of the photo, or to change the aspect ratio of the photo so that it can be printed full frame on a selected paper size. Most good photo programs have a cropping tool.

Experimenting with colors can be a great way to create a whole new picture from something plain. There are so many ways to edit colors, and playing around with them can help you discover different techniques. You can make a photograph look aged with sepia, or you can change a color photograph to black and white. Just about all photo-editing programs have color-balance options. All you have to do is experiment with them to find results you like.

Most of us upload our pictures or print them the way they were captured by our digital cameras. We read and hear of a post-processing technique called “Sharpening” using “USM” (or “UnSharp Mask”) and decide it is just too difficult for us. Most cameras — especially in the “pro” category — will capture an image without applying any sharpening to it, resulting in an image that appears “soft” or even slightly “out of focus.” Others will apply a certain degree of sharpening to the images and output crisp looking images. Most beginners prefer the latter type, while most advanced photographers prefer the former. When a camera processes your images, it is in effect deciding the amount of sharpening to give your images without your input. Some cameras do a good job at it, others do too much of it. If your camera produces “soft” images (because it does not sharpen for you), then you are in fact in luck. Using an image editing software such as Photoshop Elements, you can apply sharpening yourself to selected pictures for maximum impact, either for screen display or for printing.

Depending on your needs, you may want to resize your photo. If you’re emailing a picture to a friend, you’ll want to resize the picture down to a much smaller size. If you’re printing the photo on a greeting card, you can scale down the image to the size of a 4×6 print. Most pictures need a little work to get them just right. You can turn an average picture into a great one with a minor fix: resizing the picture. With a digital photo-editing program, you can complete this task easily and quickly.

Remember to save your work in the appropriate image format. Use the large TIFF image format if you want to retain all details for subsequent image editing. On the other hand, you can use the JPEG image format if you want to just send the picture via email or upload them to your website. With the explosion of scanners, digital cameras and the World Wide Web, the JPEG image format has quickly become the most widely used digital image format. Many people believe a JPEG image will lose quality every time it is opened or saved. This is simply not true. Saving a JPEG repeatedly during the same editing session (without ever closing the image) will not accumulate a loss in quality. Copying and renaming a JPEG will not introduce any loss, but some image editors do recompress JPEGs when the Save As command is used. To avoid more loss you should duplicate and rename JPEGs in a file manager rather than using “Save As JPEG” in an editing program. However, if a JPEG image is opened, edited, and saved again it results in additional image degradation.

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Tags: Computers