Digital Photography Basics – Overview Of Photo Editing Software

For 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.

You can think of image software as the same to a digital photographer as 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.

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 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 will highlight the most popular types of photo editing software so you can understand the differences between each of them.

Picasa: Google’s free photo editor. If you are just getting into the very basics of digital photography, 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 functions like retouching where you can remove scratches or blemishes. 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 you could possibly need as a professional photographer or graphic artist. It sells for approximately $700 on their site, but it’s offered for half that by some vendors and may offer a free trial version.

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: For such a powerful program the name certainly doesn’t fit it but instead is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. This photo editor is open source (aka freeware) and continues to improve and has a good community of users if you need help. It is available for Unix/Linux platforms, as well as Windows (NT4/2000/XP/Vista) and Mac operating systems (OS X). 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 but you will be amazed at the magic you can do with your photos if you spend a little effort.

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 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.

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.