| 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 To get started you must first open your chosen image editing program. For those just starting out, try a program such as Ulead Photo Impact. This particular program provides professional level results while still being simple and friendly to use. Step 2: Remove Red-Eye If you're taking photos of people, chances are you may have taken a photo with red-eye problems. This is easily removed with image editing software. In Paint Shop Pro, select the Red-Eye Removal tool in the menu and voila, the program does all the work for you. In Ulead PhotoImpact, there's an equivalent tool called Remove Red Eye in the Tool Panel. Step 3: Rotate and Crop If you want to change the angle of your photograph, you can do this with little loss in quality by using the rotate tool. You may also need to crop your photo to remove cluttered or unnecessary background area that might take focus away from the subject of the photo. Doing this will create a much more professional look. Step 4: Play with Color Experiment with the different color tools for a different look. Through the versatility of digital editing programs you can make the sky green, the whole photo black and white, or give it an antiqued look with a sepia tone. A good photo editing program will have an automatic color balance option to adjust color flaws 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 The next step in touching up a photo would be to sharpen as needed. While you cannot truly sharpen an out of focus image you can improve on it by selectively sharpening focal points. Sharpen a person's eyes for example and leave the rest of the image unsharpened. Step 7: Resize Depending on your needs, you may want to resize your photo. If you're emailing a picture to a friend, you'll want to resize the picture down to a much smaller size. If you're printing the photo on a greeting card, you can scale down the image to the size of a 4x6 print. 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 That's it! Now you know the basics for touching up and getting your raw digital photos ready for output. While you don't have to use every step listed above, it can give you a starting point to see which ones a certain picture might need. Have fun with your photos, experiment to see what enhancements you like best and practice, practice, practice! |
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