In order to edit pictures successfully, one must have the proper tools, just as when processing photos in a darkroom. In the latter, chemicals, exposure times, and certain materials can affect the outcome of a photograph. In today’s darkrooms, photo editing programs, one must know how to use the tools at hand to create the results wanted. Using photo editing programs makes editing much easier. It is far less expensive than working in a traditional darkroom and far less time-consuming if you wish it to be. However, you may also take your time editing to come out with the best results. Mistakes are not embedded in stone, for there’s always the “undo” button to rely on. Using your software, you can improve an image, or change it to something completely different. The resolution of your computer’s monitor can greatly affect the outcome of your photos. This is the amount of pixels there are on the screen. The more there are, generally, the better the quality of the images. Making sure you have a monitor that is suited for photo editing is an important part of the process. However, you must remember that certain resolutions are meant for certain sized monitors. A large resolution on a small monitor makes everything too small, whereas the opposite makes everything too big. Make sure you know what resolution your monitor is made for.
The display resolution of a digital television or computer display typically refers to the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. Some commentators also use this term to indicate a range of input formats that the display’s input electronics will accept and often include formats greater than the screen’s native grid size even though they have to be down-scaled to match the screen’s parameters. An example of pixel shape affecting “resolution” or perceived sharpness is displaying more information in a smaller area using a higher resolution, which makes the image much clearer. However, newer LCD displays and such are fixed at a certain resolution; making the resolution lower on these kinds of screens will greatly decrease sharpness, as an interpolation process is used to “fix” the non-native resolution input into the displays native resolution output.
The best thing about digital cameras is that it’s easy to take thousands of pictures. That’s also the worst thing about digital cameras. After you’ve owned your camera for a few months, you won’t 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 is a great place to start. In your My Pictures folder, create a subfolder 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.
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.
Sharpen filters bring out detail in images 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 photo 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 sharpening tool that is most useful for photographs is the Unsharp Mask, now available in most raster programs. 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.
Often times images are posted on the web and resized with HTML code. This leads to an image full of jagged edges. By resizing your image in an image 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 an image, you are resampling an 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. When you resize an image, you can also change image resolution, to keep the quality of your image.
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.”
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