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 Should you be taking photos of people, odds are that some if not many will suffer from red-eyes issues. This is easily solved with image editing software. In Ulead Photo Impact you will find an option called Remove Red Eye in the Tool Panel that will correct the red-eye problems. Paint Shop Pro also has a Red-Eye Removal tool in the menu that when chosen will do all of the work for you.
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 Editing software opens a whole world of color options to you. Experiment with color variations for a new and unique look for your image. You can make clouds purple, change your photo to black and white, add a rose hueany effect you might want. A good photo editing program should have an automatic color balance option to adjust color imperfections in your photos.
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 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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