Find out some key information about Digital Photography

By Dan Brown

Creating better composition. This is the first and most important step in creating the perfect image. Get this right and your photo could be stunning. There are certain rules to the composition of the perfect image which we will not go into in detail here but you can adjust your image in Photoshop so that it adheres to some of these rules. For example, with a little creative use of the crop tool you can resize your image and adjust the position of the subject to fall into one of the key positions making it more pleasing to the eye. For example, in most cases, a central subject is not as effective as one that is offset to the side (adhering to the rule of thirds). Using crop can effectively move the subject over, up or down to position it perfectly.

With Picture Manager you can work with multiple pictures at once or edit pictures one at a time. You edit pictures in the Edit Pictures task pane. The quickest and easiest way to clean up all your pictures at once is to simply select them all in the Edit Pictures task pane, and then, on the Picture menu, click AutoCorrect.

The editing programs today can do wonders to images. One of the most popular programs is Adobe PhotoShop, since this editing program is one of the most sophisticated tools. Most pro photographers will use this program, since you can create websites, book covers, images, movies, and more. Adobe is also used to design manuals, graphics, commercials, fliers, and more. This particular program I miss. I lost my copy during a severe virus attack, and the downside is it costs around $1000 to $1500 to replace. Outside of lightning effects, you can also setup brick backgrounds, or whatever background you choose. If you own this program you know what I am talking about, however if you have never had the experience and can get the opportunity to try out Adobe I promise you will have loads of fun.

But what good is that going to do if you're used to the Photoshop interface? Nothing. In a nutshell, Photoshop is for linear thinkers, and Gimp is for lateral thinkers. Both of them can arrive at very nearly the same result, so close that it's a neck and neck race. Bottom line, for website graphics and simple editing jobs it's almost insane to spend the money to use Photoshop. And Gimp is likewise inadequate for the needs of a professional print shop. Go ahead, give Gimp a try. You have nothing to loose, and its free!

The Photoshop plug-ins which are available can help perform tasks much faster and more efficiently than performing these tasks by hand. The 3D plug-ins are used to create 3D images and type very quickly and elegantly. The color management Photoshop plug-ins can create new colors to correspond to the printer that you are using, or the monitor that you are using to create your graphics. The digital asset management plug-ins are used to organize all of the digital images that you have created so that finding the correct image is much easier than without it. The photographic ones give many different professional lens techniques that you can apply to any picture to create amazing effects.

The basic idea is to either copy the Background Layer and make any adjustment directly to it (color adjustments, sharpening, bluring, contrast, exposure, etc.) or make that alteration in an adjustment layer. Once you've made the adjusted layer (either using a duplicated layer or a true adjustment layer) then Go Overboard!! I mean it, allow yourself to go way sharp, way blurry, way magenta, way saturated, whatever you're doing, do it more than needed.

Photoshop is a wonderful tool for creating web sites. It allows even a novice the ability to create a fully functional web site without much knowledge of HTML or JavaScript. You can create an entire web page template with Photoshop, and then use Image Ready to slice up the image and create the HTML for you. Or you can use Photoshop to create just the navigation for your web site, or to optimize images on your web site. No matter how you use Photoshop, it will definitely make your web site look much nicer, and also help it to run faster.

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