For anyone who loves taking pictures, it’s worth while getting acquainted with photo editing software as they can make a big difference with how your pictures turn out.
You can think of image software as the same to a digital photographer as the dark room is to a film photographer. The big benefit of photo editing software is that it’s easier to do than setting up a darkroom.
And with photo editing software, you can do standard image editing functions like cropping and adjusting color, and can also do photo manipulation.
Image editing refers to any change that is made to a picture. Photo manipulation is what photographers sometimes refer to as “trick photography” where you can do things like changing backgrounds and other things. (For some fun examples of photo manipulation, look up the “National Geographic Photo Foolery” page online.)
Before you choose a photo editor, you first want to understand the type of image editing you want to do. In this article, we’ll highlight the most popular ones:
Picasa: Google’s free photo editor. If you are just getting into the very basics of digital photography, this will serve you well for a while. It is really designed to be more of an online photo album or photo manager but can also handle basic photo editing. Picasa offers basic editing tools such as retouch, which helps you remove blemishes, scratches, etc. Like many photo editors it has red eye remover. It also has some fun functionality where you can create screensavers with your photos and even integrate them with Google Earth.
If you are ready to advance from the digital photography basics and do more with your pictures, then you should consider one of the following photo editors:.
Adobe Photoshop Elements: The market leader in photo editing and manipulation, it’s more user-friendly and less costly (approximately $90) than its big brother, Photoshop CS4. It’s great for the photography enthusiast and there is even a free trial version.
Adobe Photoshop CS4: This has everything you could possibly need as a professional photographer or graphic artist. It sells for about $700 on their website, but you can find it half that price by some vendors or look for a free trial version.
Paint Shop Pro: This is a close competitor to Photoshop Elements and also runs about $90. They also offer a 30 day free trial.
The GIMP: For such a powerful program the name certainly doesn’t fit it but instead is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. This photo editor is open source (aka freeware) and continues to improve and has a good community of users if you need help. It is available for Unix/Linux platforms, as well as Windows (NT4/2000/XP/Vista) and Mac operating systems (OS X). It doesn’t quite have everything that you get with Adobe Photoshop CS4, but it has more than Elements or Paint Shop Pro and is used cialis pills by some professionals.
No matter what photo editor you have, read through the guide or help sections so you understand what you can do with it.
It takes time to learn but you will be impressed with what you can do with your images.
For example, here are a just a few of the things you can accomplish (the top 5 even with just Picasa):
- Crop
- Resize
- Lighten or darken shadows, highlights, and midtones
- Correct Colors
- Remove blemishes, a stray branch, a logo, or anything else you don’t want in the picture
- Blur Backgrounds (Photoshop Elements, Paintshop Pro and The GIMP all offer background-blurring applications. Picasa can’t do this.)
You can also create all sorts of special effects with a photo editor. For example you can turn your photo into an impressionistic painting. You can turn a color photo into black and white to capture the tones, lines and highlights without the distraction of color.
Or for a more vintage or antique look, you can choose buy Femara online sepia.
And with photo editing software, you can also more easily create pictures that can go in any size picture frame whether it’s a small picture frame or a 4×6 picture frame or larger.
Even if you don’t care about special effects, learning the basics of even the most basic photo editor will allow you to fix mistakes made in photographing. Just cropping alone can do wonders if you couldn’t get a close enough shot or you’ve got too much clutter in price cialis the picture. That is why photo editing is an important part of learning the digital photography basics and why it’s important that you learn it. Before long, you will be editing and producing quality photographs that you will be proud to display in a metal photo frame and hang on your wall.
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This post was written by admin on September 3, 2010
