Edit Digital Photography - Digital Photos Touch Up Guide

By David M Peters

The advances and conveniences in digital photography make it possible for anyone to take a perfect picture, but how exactly is this possible is we all are not the world's greatest photographer? By touching up your raw images through digital editing you can take what was once an average picture and make it a great photograph. Maybe you needed to lighten your image, crop or rotate a bit and even clean up some dirty spots; this is all quick and simple to do once you know how. Most pictures need some type of adjusting to produce the final image. Take a look at this short guide to help you with the most common touch ups for your photos.

Step 1: Start Up Your Image Editor The first step, of course, is to fire up your favorite image editing program. For beginners, it's best to get a program like Ulead PhotoImpact. It's a great tool that allows you to achieve professional photo effects using simple, easy-to-follow steps.

Step 2: Remove Red-Eye Almost everyone has experienced the red-eye effect when taking pictures of people. This is an easy corrected problem with image editing software. A Red-Eye Removal tool can be found in the menu of Paint Shop Pro that does all of the work for you. Ulead Photo Impact offers the same feature with its Remove Red Eye option in the Tool Panel.

Step 3: Rotate and Crop If you've taken a photo in a wrong orientation, it's easily corrected with little loss in quality by using a rotate tool. You'll also want to do some cropping of your photo to remove cluttered surroundings that draw attention away from your subject. For example, I find cropping very useful if my subject is occupying only the middle portion of the photograph. Cut away the two sides of the picture and you have a much more professional look.

Step 4: Play with Color Don't be afraid to experiment with colors. Image editing programs put a lot of power in your hands. You can make the leaves purple, change the entire photo to black and white, add a sepia effect - almost anything you want. A good photo editing program will have automatic color balance options to adjust color defects in your pictures.

Step 5: Blurring Effects Sometimes I like to add a blurring effect to my photos. What you can do here is to select areas of the photo which are unimportant and blur them out. This will bring more attention to the main subject of your photo. For example, if I had a picture of a flower and I wanted to play down the details in the leaves in background, I might add a blurring effect to the background.

Step 6: Sharpen Up Sharpening the image is the next step in the photo touch up process. You cannot sharpen an out of focus image into clarity contrary to popular belief. The best way to utilize the sharpen tool is to selectively sharpen just a portion of an image such as a person's eyes. Leave the unimportant areas unsharpened to give the focus to your selected area.

Step 7: Resize You may need to resize your photo to suit your need. To e-mail your photo, resize to a smaller dimension. To print on a greeting card, you will want to resize your image to a 4x6 size.

Step 8: Save Your Work You're almost there. Now just remember to save your work in the proper image format. Use the larger TIFF image format to preserve all details for further image editing. If you just want to e-mail your pictures or upload them to your website, the JPEG image format would work best.

Conclusion Alrighty then! Now you know the secret to touching up and preparing your raw digital photos for output. I'd say that not all the above steps are truly necessary in a given situation. Remember to use your discretion to see which is necessary. Don't be afraid to experiment and learn - practice makes perfect when it comes to touching up your photos.

Would like to find out more about editing digital photography? Don't trust anybody's advice until you read this free report.

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