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Learning how to edit digital photography can be easy

By: Dan Brown

Image editors (also known as photo editors) allow you to create and modify graphics and photographic images. This includes tasks such as painting and drawing, color correction, photo enhancement, creating special effects, converting images, and adding text to graphics. Your image 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 photo editing application.



Sometimes, people will try to store all their pictures on CDs, because their computer doesn't have enough memory to store them all. For the specific reason that having multiple discs to search through for a particular picture is time-consuming and therefore wasteful, it's a good idea to get a database. A database allows you to keep track of which CDs contain which pictures, where other images are stored, and so on. You can keep your images anywhere, but it is the database that allows you to remember where exactly you put them. You don't actually put the pictures in the database, only information about them. This way it is easier for you to find them in the future.



There are many different photo-editing programs out there. Many people believe that the level of difficulty of the program indicates its quality. However, many programs are quite simple to use and are of high quality. Several programs will make adjustments for you based on one entered specification, whereas others require you to perform several steps yourself to get the desired effect. Depending on what you're most comfortable with, whether it's pressing a button and having the rest done for you, or doing it all yourself, not every program will be for you. Choose according to your level of experience and your needs in the program.



When it comes time to touch up your digital photos, you will need a photo-editing program. 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 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.



Pictures are measured in size by how many pixels they contain. When you've taken a picture that is simply too large, you can resize the image by changing the number of pixels it contains. To make an image smaller you must reduce the pixels, and vice versa. Sometimes pictures look better smaller than the original size. Rarely do pictures look better larger, because resizing an image to make it bigger usually makes it blurry. To see what the best size for an image is, you will have to experiment until you find one that you believe looks best.



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



Cropping is the process of selecting and removing a portion of an image to create focus or strengthen its composition. Even the best photographers will often get back to their computers to view their photos and find that they are not ideal for one reason or another including distracting background elements, framing mistakes, or unbalanced images. While the temptation might be to delete such images the beauty of shooting in the digital format is that editing images after shooting them is relatively quick and easy. Cropping is one option for fixing such problems. This is usually done in photo editing software. Cropping images give you a second chance to frame your images. While you can never really add to the photograph to put more space around your subject (or recover the ear you clipped), cropping the image even tighter can take the focus away from the clipped part of your subject and make the image quite dynamic.

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