Digital Photography Basics - Overview of Photo Editing Software

For anyone who loves taking pictures, it's worth while getting acquainted with photo editing software as they can make a big difference with how your pictures turn out.

Photo 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.

And in addition to doing standard image editing functions like adjusting color and cropping, with photo editing software you can also do photo manipulation.

Image editing refers to all changes that are made to a photograph. Photo manipulation refers to what film shutterbugs used to call "trick photography" - switching backgrounds and such. (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 many photo editors it has red eye remover. It also has some fun functionality where you can create screensavers with your photos and even integrate them 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 a professional photographer or graphic artist needs. It sells for about $700 on their website, but you can find it for half that by some vendors.

Paint Shop Pro

This is a direct competitor of Photoshop Elements and also costs 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 Windows (NT4, 2000/XP/Vista), Mac Operating Systems (OS X) and even Unix/Linux platforms. 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.

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 turn your photo 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.

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 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. And in no time, you'll be editing and printing quality pictures perfect for hanging on your wall.


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Autumn Lockwood is a writer for Your Picture Frames and loves picture frames. Shop online and see our quality selection of picture frames like our popular sized frames by visiting our website or calling us at 1-800-780-0699.