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."


Learn more about editing knowledge editing digital photography at Edit Your Digital Photos.

Photography Tips - Portrait Photos

Portrait photography is an important aspect of photography in general. High quality portrait photos are impressive projections of emotions and feelings, and captures the objects' character forever. This article will provide you with guidelines for achieving such high quality portrait photos.

Although producing true high quality portrait photos is an art and requires experimentation and experience, there are some simple general techniques that you can follow in order to quickly improve your portrait photos. Here are a few:

Background: A good portrait photo, or for that matter any photo in which a person is the center of attention, should have a passive background that does not take the attention away from the object. Specifically a portrait photo is all about the objects face. Take your photos in a neutral background. A background that is comprised of soft solid colors is an example of a good background to use. A busy street or people moving around are examples of bad backgrounds to use in portrait photos.

Blurring: Another way to focus the viewer's attention on the object and not the background is to blur the background details. Blurring the background will literally lift the object out of the photo and make it stand out. The technique to blue the background is pretty simple you will need to set your camera to a shallow depth of field. You can do that by using a zoom lens and shooting from a short distance or with a wide aperture manual setting.

Lighting: Lighting is a simple but important issue in portrait photography. Natural lighting is preferable whenever possible. Natural light is much better at capturing the full color range and warmth of the skin than artificial lighting. Try taking portrait photos outdoors during the day. Position the subject in such a way that sunlight hits them from an angle and not directly. Taking photos with the sun behind the subject will result in a silhouette. On the other hand, taking photos with the sun right in front of the subject will result in overexposure and color distortion. You can use a fill-in flash to compensate for some shadowing that might occur on the face, especially in the nose area.

The eyes: Although a face has many details - nose, eyes, mouth, and so on - the eyes are the overwhelmingly important feature to focus on in a portrait photo. The eyes tell a story and they convey emotions, feelings and state of mind. Focusing on them will make the photo better project all those feelings. Depending on the emotions and story that you are trying to convey through the photo, guide your object to look straight to the camera or to look sideways by focusing on another object.

Experiment: It takes time and experience to perfect your portrait shooting abilities. With digital cameras the cost of taking photos is literally zero, thereby allowing you to experiment extensively until you get a good sense of how to produce high quality portrait photos.

Photography Lighting Techniques

Lighting is one of the most important aspects of photography, since it is light that is captured by a camera. Understanding how lighting works and what you can do with different lighting conditions can lead to a better photography experience and results.

Consider the angle of the light entering the frame, the kind of shadows you want, and whether you want to use fill-in-flash (using flash to light the subject if you have a really bright background). If you are shooting at night you can create all sorts of cool effects like lights in motion, pictures with moonlight, or silhouettes. The following are just some examples of all the possibilities.

Angle of Light

The angle of light should be taken into careful consideration whenever you feel like you want to create a specific effect. Shadows can be very powerful when cast over half of someone's face. When you are deciding which angle you would prefer to have the light coming from you are indirectly deciding where the shadows will be cast. The angle of light can be used to show texture if it is coming from the side because the shadows create the effect of more depth. It can add detail and mystery to someone's face if you choose to keep half of their face in the shadows. The most common light usage mistake that people make when they are taking portrait pictures is having the light coming directly from the back when they don't intend to create a silhouette. This usually results in having the subject's face just very dark and the background overexposed.

Light Rays Effect

The effect of rays of light indoors and outdoors can be very spectacular. A brilliant part of some great photographs is the ability to actually see rays of light in a photo. Whether it is in the setting of a brilliant sunset, light pouring through a window or light from artificial lights almost all kinds have the potential to look amazing. Usually the only way to obtain something like this is a narrow aperture (high f/stop) and a very slow shutter speed. I have found rays of light to be very nice in architectural photography in the form of light streaming through windows or spaces.

Silhouettes

Silhouettes are another interesting example of strategic light use. The way to create a silhouette is to have significantly brighter light coming from behind the subject. In doing this it is important to take your camera light reading off of the background instead of the subject in order for the camera to adjust for an exposure based on the backlight. If you do this the subject will be successfully underexposed and the background should hopefully have a well-balanced exposure. You can do this for any kind of subject including people, animals, landscapes and impressive cityscapes.

Scarce Light in the Darkness

Photography at night is completely different than photography in the day. At night there is most likely not enough light to handhold the camera if you are going to take a well-exposed photo (without flash). A tripod is very necessary and I always use a tripod when I am shooting at night to take away the risk of blur from hand shakiness. If you keep experimenting with different ways of using light you will find that you can get very interesting results. One favorite location of night photographers is on the roadside of a busy street. With a long shutter speed the photographer can use the car lights to make streams of light across the frame. The longer the exposure, the more fascinating the results with light most of the time.

Try This Technique to Make a Copy of Someone

Set the shutter speed for somewhere around 30 seconds, set the camera on a tripod and set the self-timer so you do not have to press the shutter button. Someone needs to stand next to the camera with a flashlight and someone else needs to be the subject of the photo in front of the camera. The subject then stands in one place while the flashlight is pointed at him and moved in an up and down motion. After around 15 seconds the flashlight is turned off and the subject is told to move to his left. Then the flashlight is pointed at him again and moved up and down until the camera finishes the exposure. If you do this successfully you can create the same person twice in one frame.

Conclusion

The use of light is a very essential practice to master if you are going to be a successful photographer. When a digital camera takes a photo its sensor is essentially just collecting all the light from the scene that is reflected in through the lens. It is your job simply to figure out where you would like the light to be coming from and how long the sensor should be exposed to the light in order to create a sufficient exposure.

About the Author: HDR Japan is an Okinawa Japan photo blog and cultural information resource.