Digital Photography Basics – Understanding The Types Of Photo Editing Software
ByFor 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 big benefit of photo editing software is that it’s easier to do than 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 all changes that are made to a photograph. 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.)
Once you know the type of image editing you want to do, you will be better able to choose a photo editor. In this article, we’ll highlight the most popular ones:
Picasa: A free photo editor from Google. If you are just starting to learn the digital photography basics, then this will serve you well for a while. It is really designed to be more of an online photo album or photo manager but can also handle basic photo editing. Picasa offers basic editing tools such as retouch, which helps you remove blemishes, scratches, etc. 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: This is more user-friendly and less costly than it’s “big brother” Photoshop CS4 and is the market leader in photo editing and manipulation. It’s great for the photography enthusiast and there is even a free trial version.
Adobe Photoshop CS4: This has everything a professional photographer or graphic artist needs. 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 30 day free 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 Windows (NT4, 2000/XP/Vista), Mac Operating Systems (OS X) and even Unix/Linux platforms. It doesn’t have everything you get with Adobe Photoshop CS4, but it does have more than Paint Shop Pro or Elements and is used by some professionals.
No matter what photo editor you have, read through the guide or help sections so you understand what you can do with it.
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 also convert a color picture into a black and white image to better capture the tones and highlights.
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 4×6 picture frame or larger.
Even if you don’t care about special effects, learning the basics of even the most basic photo editor will allow you to fix mistakes made in photographing. Just cropping alone can do wonders if you couldn’t get a close enough shot or you’ve got too much clutter in the picture. 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.
