When people take digital images and put them on their computers, the pictures are generally not perfect. This is where enhancements come in, they will make it so your picture looks almost professional. One enhancement that is used often is the sharpness enhancement. The sharpness enhancement is extremely helpful. Basically it improves the quality on a fuzzy picture. Almost every editor has the sharpness too, sadly most of them aren't the best. The best ones use algorithms internally to help with the enhancement of the photo. This tool is extremely useful for blurry pictures or one with fuzzy lines and borders.

To resize or to resample, that is the question. The answer to that question is really what your editor has and what you feel like doing. Resizing is a lot simpler than re-sampling but doesn't turn out as nice. This is because when you reduce an image with resizing a few pixels will be deleted altogether. When enlarging an image by resizing the pixels will be doubled or even tripled. This creates a fuzzy or blocky image. While re-sampling uses algorithms to either interpolate (enlarging the image by adding color to pixels) or reduce images by re-calculating all the pixels in the photo. Decent image editors will have a few algorithms for re-sampling and resizing will be an available option.

Lossy or lossless, this is the question of compression. Choosing compression formats is pretty easy; do you want the original image? Or do you want to be able to upload images to the web quickly and without worry? Lossless is for the people who want to the original, you can't pick what size the image will end up in but there will be no loss of the original image. Basically this is for if you want to be able to view the image but not send across the web. Lossy is all about easy transportation of images. You can pick the size of the image and transferring it is extremely easy and fast. Lossy generally ends up in the format of .jpg which is the most commonly read image format across the internet. Lossless ends up often in the .png format which is the most accepted format amongst average image software. When it comes down to deciding you have to think about whether you want it to be quickly accessible or completely original.

Having a half decent image viewer is just as important as actually changing them. Having the ability to easily access and change your images in a process that isn't complicated to you is essential. There should be some definite functions, like the viewer should easily be adapt to your needs, be able to enhance photos and be beneficial to your use. Aquiring photos and adding them to your database should be quite easy. Managing EXIF data and being able to batch process is helpful. A couple recommended viewers would be Photophilia and Zoner Photo Studio. These are both amateur accessible and function filled. Helpful functions that you could have would be the batch function, editing function, a file filter would be nice and the image size via pixels.

When you want to you don't have do edit a whole bunch of images at a time. Having something that will control all the changes you want made to a large amount of images. If you want the images resizes it is very easy. There are bunch of types of batch processors. Each has its ups and downs, some photo viewers even have batch software that comes with them. A good example of what you want a batch processor to is have a large amount of images in one directory ready to go. Then you tell the software what to do, e.g. 50 images that need to be resized to 100 x 50 pixels then add a watermark and compress the image to 5kb to be transferred in email. Then you tell the program to run and within the next hour your images will be all ready to go.

A handy tool to have if you don't intend to collect thousands of pictures is a digital photo album. This is handy because you can add descriptions and make sure you get a nice looking album for people to look at. This is different from a photo view because it actually stores all the photos no matter where they are located. The program will actually go and find all your photos. This would not be recommended if you have more than 2,000 photos because if a file gets corrupted you could lose all your pictures. An online viewer would actually be useful because then after you used a batch processor you could upload them all to the site and have just as nice of an album online. In the end it is up to you whether even want an album in the first place.

Everyday many questions come in about the many processes with digital photography: Q: I had a hard drive crash. A recovery software program recovered a number of digital photos but for some reason saved them with the file extension ".PHB". Photoshop can't open this file so I can't change it. Any ideas? A: A file with an unknown and bad file extension should be renamed first. After that it can be opened again. Easy recipes to rename a file or to rename a bunch of files at Rename File Extension. Q: My roommate, thinking to help save space, compressed my photos and saved them at the new smaller size. How can I undo it? A: First it is important to note that photo compression and photo resizing are 2 completely different things. The short answer is that neither photo compression nor photo resizing can be undone, since a part of the original information is lost and can not be retrieved by magic. There is a more detailed explanation at Photo resizing versus photo compression.