Thursday, September 18, 2008

Start editing your new digital photos now

By David Peters


One good available option is Kodak Gallery, which allows you to store and share you pictures for free, as long as you buy at least one print a year. Other good available options are flickr and shutter fly, which are both free and offer extra services. There are great tools to edit your photos and create cool slide shows. You can use the software that comes with your camera or you can use other photo editing software. Picasa by google is a good free option, and for more advanced users photoshop may the way to go. So have fun with your photos already.

One of the most recognized and utilized programs for photo editing is Adobe's Photoshop. From this software the term "shopped" was phrased. People who work with and view photography use the term to refer to photographs which appear to have been manipulated to show something that was not in the original photograph, to remove something which was, or when the appearance of a person or object in the photo seems to have been altered. For example, you find a picture of a group of famous (or infamous) people, then you replace the face of one of them with your own for laughs, you have "shopped" the photo. Other programs are Corel Paint Shop Pro, and Serif Photo Plus, to name but a few. There are basic photo editing programs available that allow you to do basic adjustments and learn basic photo manipulation. Some of these programs can be found for free such as Gimp for Windows, Serif's Photo Plus, Paint.NET, Image Forge, Pixia, Ultimate Paint, and several others.

The resolution of your computer's monitor can greatly affect the outcome of your photos. This is the amount of pixels there are on the screen. The more there are, generally, the better the quality of the images. Making sure you have a monitor that is suited for photo editing is an important part of the process. However, you must remember that certain resolutions are meant for certain sized monitors. A large resolution on a small monitor makes everything too small, whereas the opposite makes everything too big. Make sure you know what resolution your monitor is made for. The display resolution of a digital television or computer display typically refers to the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. Some commentators also use this term to indicate a range of input formats that the display's input electronics will accept and often include formats greater than the screen's native grid size even though they have to be down-scaled to match the screen's parameters. An example of pixel shape affecting "resolution" or perceived sharpness is displaying more information in a smaller area using a higher resolution, which makes the image much clearer.

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. 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.

In earlier times, you took your snapshots with your trusty old Brownie, removed the film cartridge and dropped it off at the drug store for developing. After about a week, you picked up your prints. What you got was exactly what the film was exposed to. No cropping, no sharpening, brightness or contrast adjustments were available unless you had your own film processing and print studio. With the onset of digital photography, it has become possible for everyone to learn and perform successful photo editing. There exists a plethora of digital photography software that allow differing levels of image manipulation. With a decent digital camera, a computer with a quality printer, and one of the many versions of photo editing software, you can produce stunning photographs. You can crop for closer views of your intended subject, darken or lighten the exposure, adjust the contrast, sharpen the image, change it to black and white, sepia, or grayscale. Add a good scanner and you have the ability to edit your old standard photographs. That old faded photo of you as a child can be brought back to life with a few clicks of your mouse. With the right software, you can place objects from one photograph into another. Create a montage of any person containing their pictures from birth to present. That beautiful old Ford you took a picture of at the cruise-in brings back fond memories?

When comparing traditional vs. digital photography one of the arguments may be the ease of use. In utilizing a digital camera it is simply a matter of pointing and shooting. The image is captured by the digital camera and embedded on the memory stick contained within the digital camera. Also, using the easy viewing screen on the camera, the photographer can instantly see whether the picture is what they wanted or if it needs to be taken again. In fact if the picture has movement or does not capture the image that the photographer wants, it is easy to delete the picture from the memory stick.

At times the subject of a picture is lost in the surrounding parts of a picture. If this happens, you can always crop your picture. This means cutting down the picture to a certain size. There are many ways to do this in terms of the size of cropping. In just about every photo editing program there is a cropping tool, and you can experiment with the size of the area that you take out of your photograph. If you don't like what you've done, all you have to do is click "undo.

About the Author:

No comments: