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Digital Photography Basics - Photo Editing Software Overview
For the digital photography enthusiast, becoming well acquainted with photo editing is one of the digital photography basics that can make a world of difference in how well a photograph turns out.
Image editing software to a digital photographer is what the dark room is to a film photographer. The difference is that photo editing software makes photo editing something that anyone can do without setting up a darkroom.
Plus, with photo editing software you can do both standard image editing, such as cropping and adjusting color, and with the right software, you can also try your hand at 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 will highlight the most popular types of photo editing software so you can understand the differences between each of them.
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's really intended to be more of a photo manager and online photo album both very handy applications, but Picasa also handles the most basic editing. Picasa offers basic editing functions like retouching where you can remove scratches or blemishes. Like most editors it has red eye removal. It also has fun applications like creating screensavers with your photos and integration 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 free 30-day trial.
The GIMP: An odd name for such a powerful program, the acronym stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. This open source, freeware continues to improve and has a good community of users should 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 by some professionals.
To get the best use out of your photo editor, look at its guide or help sections for an overview of what you can do with it, and then read the help sections on any new applications you want to try that aren't 100 percent intuitive.
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 convert your photograph 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 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 4x6 picture frame or larger.
Even if you don't want to do any cool special effects, learning the basics of any photo editor will let you fix "mistakes" in your photos. Just by cropping your picture can make a big difference in how your photograph turns out. For these reasons image editing is part of just about any digital photography basics course or book you might find. Before you know it, you will be editing and producing quality images perfect for displaying in a metal picture frame.
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