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.
You can think of image software as the same to a digital photographer as 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.
And with photo editing software, you can do standard image editing functions like cropping and adjusting color, and 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 will highlight the most popular types of photo editing software so you can understand the differences between each of them.
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’s really intended to be more of a photo manager and online photo album both very handy applications, but Picasa also handles the most basic editing. Picasa offers basic editing functions like retouching where you can remove scratches or blemishes. 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’re ready to advance from digital photography basics and do more with your images, consider one of the other 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 good for the photography enthusiast plus there is 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 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 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 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. Before long, you will be editing and producing quality photographs that you will be proud to display in a metal photo frame and hang on your wall.
Tags: basics of photography, digital photography basics, photo editing tips, photography basics