Secrets to Editing Digital Photography

Digital photo editors allow you to create and modify graphics and digital photographic images. This includes tasks such as painting and drawing, color correction, photo enhancement, creating special effects, converting images, and adding text to digital photographs. Your digital photo editor will probably be your most frequently used tool for working with graphics so it should be flexible and intuitive. Many software programs are available for enhancing and otherwise working with bitmap images, but unless they can perform all of the tasks above sufficiently, they should only be considered as companion tools to your primary digital photo editing application.

The best thing about digital cameras is that it's easy to take a lot of pictures. That is also the worst thing about digital cameras. After you've owned your camera for a few months, you will not be able to find that great picture you took a couple of months ago if your pictures aren't well organized or named logically. Folders are the best way to organize groups of pictures, and the My Pictures folder in Windows is a great place to start. In your My Pictures folder, create a sub-folder for each year: 2004, 2005, 2006, and so on. This might seem silly the first year you own your camera, but after five years, you'll be glad you did this because you can go back to your 2005 folder and easily find a picture from a vacation you took that year. Arranging pictures by year is also helpful if you're scanning older photos stored in shoe boxes or albums that you took before owning a digital camera. This is also a good way to start organizing the pictures that you currently have on your computer.

Digital Photo Editing Software

When it comes time to touch up your digital photos, you will need a digital photo editing software. You can choose a low-priced, consumer-oriented program or a high-priced program targeted at professional photographers. For most of us, the consumer-oriented digital photo editing programs are more than adequate-and, in fact, you might have received one with your computer or digital camera. Depending on what you do with your photos, you may not need a lot of the bells and whistles when it comes to photo editing. Explore your options and find out which software is best for you. If you're a beginner, you may be happy with a package that offers only the basics, like cropping and red-eye removal. Or, perhaps you need something with more creative effects. For the ultimate in photo-editing, you may consider investing in a professional editing suite. Be warned though, software like that is going to cost you. Adobe Photoshop, for instance, has become the industry standard among professional photographers everywhere. It allows functions like level adjustment, advanced compositing, and RAW image processing.

Digital Photo Sharpening Tools

Sharpen filters bring out detail in digital photographs by increasing the contrast of pixels next to one another. More advanced image editing programs offer several options such as Sharpen, Sharpen More, Sharpen Edges and Unsharp Mask (USM). Unsharp Mask gives you a lot of control over how an image is sharpened. Sometimes a digital photograph will benefit from selective sharpening. You select an area with a programs selection tool and only sharpen the area. The important thing is not sharpen an image too much. The Unsharp Mask searches through your image looking for where colors change, and sharpens those areas. The Unsharp Mask is superior to any other sharpening because it makes decisions based on adjacent pixels, not random color changes, so it usually can find and sharpen just the true edges of color areas.

Resizing Digital Photographs

Often times digital photographs are posted on the web and resized with HTML code. This leads to an image full of jagged edges. By resizing your image in a digital photo editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop, you can utilize smoothing algorithms that will make an image look much smoother. Additionally, resizing the image will reduce the file size, allowing a web page to load faster than usual. When you resize a digital photograph, you are resampling the image. In other words, your program is taking all of the image data and redrawing the pixels so that the image is the desired size. However, when you ask the application to increase the size of the image, the size of each pixel is increased, which inevitably leads to degradation of the image. You can also change image resolution when you resize the digital photograph to keep the quality of your image.

Digital Photograph Cropping

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 digital photo editing program there is a cropping tool, and you can experiment with the size of the area that you take out of your digital photograph. If you don't like what you've done, all you have to do is click "undo."


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