Check out these unique tips to help your editing

By: Dan Brown

Many people have trouble knowing how or whether or not in the first place to edit their digital photos. Most photographs just don't turn out the way you imagined; they might be too dark, or too red, or too big. Depending on what you need in a digital photo-editing program, you may want to get a more simple or a slightly more advanced software. For example, if all you're planning on doing is correcting a few minor details in a picture, you want to go as simple as possible. If you're planning on adding things to pictures or taking them out, or changing the color of objects, you will want a more advanced program.

There are many pictures that you've probably taken that would've looked great... except for the red-eye. Just about every graphics program has a red-eye removal, so that no matter what level your program is you'll be able to remove the red-eye. However, in order to prevent it in the first place, it helps to know what causes it. Red-eye is caused by the flash reflecting to the back of the eyes all the way to the retina, and the red comes from the blood vessels in the eye. Therefore, if you flash a light in the eyes of your subject, this will cause the pupil to contract, and then there won't be any red-eye.

Cropping is a good tool to use when you have a picture that has too much going on, or perhaps too little. In the former, you would want to cut the image down to just the subject of your picture, essentially eliminating all the distracting surrounding objects. In the latter, you would do the same thing, in order for your subject not to look too solitary. Once you begin cropping, you'll find there are many different creative ways to crop your pictures; every picture is different, and you'll find different ways to improve your pictures with cropping.

Experimenting with colors can be a great way to create a whole new picture from something plain. There are so many ways to edit colors, and playing around with them can help you discover different techniques. You can make a photograph look aged with sepia, or you can change a color photograph to black and white. Just about all photo-editing programs have color-balance options. All you have to do is experiment with them to find results you like.

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.

Remember to save your work in the appropriate image format. Use the large TIFF image format if you want to retain all details for subsequent image editing. On the other hand, you can use the JPEG image format if you want to just send the picture via email or upload them to your website. With the explosion of scanners, digital cameras and the World Wide Web, the JPEG image format has quickly become the most widely used digital image format. Many people believe a JPEG image will lose quality every time it is opened or saved. This is simply not true. Saving a JPEG repeatedly during the same editing session (without ever closing the image) will not accumulate a loss in quality. Copying and renaming a JPEG will not introduce any loss, but some image editors do recompress JPEGs when the Save As command is used. To avoid more loss you should duplicate and rename JPEGs in a file manager rather than using "Save As JPEG" in an editing program. However, if a JPEG image is opened, edited, and saved again it results in additional image degradation.

Niche Article Directory: http://www.thatsmyniche.com

Editing digital photos? Wondering about finding more about editing digital photos? Now you can just by looking over this this free of charge report what are you holding back for?
Don't reprint the same version as everyone else. Get your own unique content digital photography article here.

Please Rate this Article

5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5 

Not yet Rated