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 is cropping. This can be done to either "zoom in" on a section of the (create a new 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 so that it can be printed full frame on a selected paper size. Most good 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.
