Many people have trouble knowing how or whether or not in the first place to
edit their digital photos. Most photographs just don't turn out the way you
imagined; they might be too dark, or too red, or too big. Depending on what you
need in a digital photo-editing program, you may want to get a more simple or a
slightly more advanced software. For example, if all you're planning on doing is
correcting a few minor details in a picture, you want to go as simple as
possible. If you're planning on adding things to pictures or taking them out, or
changing the color of objects, you will want a more advanced program.
There are many pictures that you've probably taken that would've looked
great... except for the red-eye. Just about every graphics program has a red-eye
removal, so that no matter what level your program is you'll be able to remove
the red-eye. However, in order to prevent it in the first place, it helps to
know what causes it. Red-eye is caused by the flash reflecting to the back of
the eyes all the way to the retina, and the red comes from the blood vessels in
the eye. Therefore, if you flash a light in the eyes of your subject, this will
cause the pupil to contract, and then there won't be any red-eye.
Cropping is a good tool to use when you have a picture that has too much
going on, or perhaps too little. In the former, you would want to cut the image
down to just the subject of your picture, essentially eliminating all the
distracting surrounding objects. In the latter, you would do the same thing, in
order for your subject not to look too solitary. Once you begin cropping, you'll
find there are many different creative ways to crop your pictures; every picture
is different, and you'll find different ways to improve your pictures with
cropping.
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.
When you upload your pictures from your digital camera to your computer, most
of them will probably be a little blurry. Probably it won't be enough to make
you want to change it, but if it's not, there's always the UnSharp Mask that you
can use to sharpen the image. Most cameras don't apply any kind of sharpening
filter to pictures they take, and so they won't always look as crisp as you
might want. Most likely if you have a basic editing program you will be able to
sharpen your pictures successfully, and you can sharpen them as much or as
little as you want.
When you email pictures to friends, you will notice it usually takes a very
long time to attach the files. This is because the size of the picture is
probably too large to process well. In order to reduce the size of the file, you
must reduce the size of the picture. Your editing program will most likely have
an option that allows you to change the dimensions of the images, which will
change the size. Usually you would use this option to make images smaller, not
larger, as the quality would be greatly reduced.
Saving your pictures in the appropriate format is very important to ensure
the best quality. If you are planning to continue to work with a certain
picture, save it as a TIFF image, as it will retain all the detail of the
picture. However, if you want a compressed image and you are done working with
it, you can save it as a JPEG. Although a JPEG is a lossy file format, it does
not lose enough data to be noticeably visible, and it is a good compressing
format. This means it will make the size of the file smaller. As long as you
don't keep opening, editing, and saving a JPEG image, you won't get too much
degradation of the photo.
