Discover The Latest Fun Ways To Edit Digital Photographs
Author: David M Peters
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.
New and expert photographers alike have experienced it. You take an otherwise
perfect picture of friends or family but there's one major flaw: glowing red
eyes. Here are some reliable tips for avoiding red-eye in the first place:
whenever possible, try not to use a flash. If you have to use a flash, ask your
subject to look toward the camera, but not directly at the lens. Also, use
additional light sources in the room. You can also take pictures during the day,
because at night the pupils will dilate meaning red-eye will be a certainty.
Lastly, you can stand farther away from your subject.
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.
If you have a rather plain photograph, or a black and white picture, there
are ways to manipulate the colors to make the picture more interesting. Your
editing program will probably have a way to enhance the color of a picture, or
you can completely change the color of an object. If you learn to use the tools
well, you could be able to convert a black and white picture to color. You can
also create aged effects, or make a picture grayscaled. Experiment with your
program and find out what you can do to improve the coloring of your
pictures.
Unsharp masking is an image manipulation technique now familiar to many users
of digital image processing software, but it seems to have been first used in
Germany in the 1930s as a way of increasing the acutance, or apparent sharpness,
of photographic images. The "unsharp" of the name derives from the fact that the
technique uses a blurred, or "unsharp", positive to create a "mask" of the
original image. The unsharped mask is then combined with the negative, creating
the illusion that the resulting image is sharper than the original. Digital
unsharp masking is a flexible and powerful way to increase sharpness, especially
in scanned images. However, it is easy to create unwanted and conspicuous edge
effects. On the other hand these effects can be used creatively, especially if
one channel of images in RGB or Lab colour space is selected for unsharp
masking.
What's the "right" size for a picture? Well, that depends on the photo. Most
monitors display at 72 dpi (dots per inch). So, if you want the picture to be 5
inches wide (probably about the biggest you would want for an e-mail message),
the picture would be 360 pixels wide (5 inches x 72 dpi = 360 pixels). Pixel is
short for "Picture Element" and is the smallest unit of visual information used
to build an image. If you have ever zoomed in on an image, Pixels are those
little squares that you see. The more pixels in an image, the better the
Resolution.
Final compression and using the right format can be as important as taking
good photos and scanning them correctly. Macs and pc's - and other types of
machines - are readily mixed in today's computer environments. This means that
proprietary file formats are no longer useful, because you want to be able to
exchange files with other people using other types of computers. Web formats are
excellent exchange formats, but unfortunately not well suited for archival
purposes. This list covers the most common file formats and comments on their
characteristics. BMP is the format that is the native Windows format, but it has
no advantages over TIFF apart from support in Windows Paint. It is accurate but
compresses poorly and has nothing close to the flexibility of TIFF. Use TIFF for
archiving in stead. Useless on the web. TIFF is the best format for storing
originals and transporting files. TIFF is accurate and compresses well without
loss of quality. TIFF can store all types of pictures - simple and complex, B/W
and color, photos and logos. TIFF is platform independent and works on both
Mac's and PC's.
