Holiday

photo credit: vgm8383

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.

Redeye can ruin an otherwise perfectly good portrait, but there are ways to remove it. Unfortunately some of these methods can remove detail in the eyes and make them look very unusual, even lifeless.The cause of red eye is the flash reflecting from the back of the eye and into the lens. The best thing is to avoid the flash to reflect from the eyes from the very beginning. Red-eye reduction works by having the flash shine a light into the eyes of the subject just prior to the flash/shutter event. This serves to cause the irises in the subject’s eyes to narrow down. The result of this is a smaller opening into the eye for a camera’s eye view of the blood filled retina. Obviously, this would work only if the subject is actually looking at the flash for the pre-light.

If you’ve taken a photo in a wrong orientation, it’s easily corrected with little loss in quality by using a rotate tool. You’ll also want to do some cropping of your photo to remove cluttered surroundings that draw attention away from your subject. Many photographs benefit from being cropped to show the most important feature and to remove the unwanted area around it. In fact, cropping is the single fix that is most likely to improve your photos. Your photo editing software will offer different methods of cropping your photos once you’ve downloaded them onto your computer. You might be surprised when you start cropping images very tightly and using shapes, as to just how different your image looks and how much of an improvement it makes.

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.

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.

When you email pictures to friends, you will notice it usually takes a very long time to attach the files. This is because the size of the picture is probably too large to process well. In order to reduce the size of the file, you must reduce the size of the picture. Your editing program will most likely have an option that allows you to change the dimensions of the images, which will change the size. Usually you would use this option to make images smaller, not larger, as the quality would be greatly reduced.

Saving your pictures in the appropriate format is very important to ensure the best quality. If you are planning to continue to work with a certain picture, save it as a TIFF image, as it will retain all the detail of the picture. However, if you want a compressed image and you are done working with it, you can save it as a JPEG. Although a JPEG is a lossy file format, it does not lose enough data to be noticeably visible, and it is a good compressing format. This means it will make the size of the file smaller. As long as you don’t keep opening, editing, and saving a JPEG image, you won’t get too much degradation of the photo.