by Dan Brown
Computers often crash and it can be very difficult and costly to recover data from a computer's hard drive. Consider using a photo sharing website; they are a good way to store and obviously share your pictures with family and friends. Photo sharing sites don't charge much to store pictures and some of them are even free. When choosing one, make sure the site have been around for a while and is here to stay. Some photo sharing sites have shut down without notice, causing their members to loose all their valuable photos.
One of the most recognized and utilized programs for photo editing is Adobe's Photoshop. From this software the term "shopped" was phrased. People who work with and view photography use the term to refer to photographs which appear to have been manipulated to show something that was not in the original photograph, to remove something which was, or when the appearance of a person or object in the photo seems to have been altered. For example, you find a picture of a group of famous (or infamous) people, then you replace the face of one of them with your own for laughs, you have "shopped" the photo. Other programs are Corel Paint Shop Pro, and Serif Photo Plus, to name but a few. There are basic photo editing programs available that allow you to do basic adjustments and learn basic photo manipulation. Some of these programs can be found for free such as Gimp for Windows, Serif's Photo Plus, Paint.NET, Image Forge, Pixia, Ultimate Paint, and several others.
The resolution of your computer's monitor can greatly affect the outcome of your photos. This is the amount of pixels there are on the screen. The more there are, generally, the better the quality of the images. Making sure you have a monitor that is suited for photo editing is an important part of the process. However, you must remember that certain resolutions are meant for certain sized monitors. A large resolution on a small monitor makes everything too small, whereas the opposite makes everything too big. Make sure you know what resolution your monitor is made for. The display resolution of a digital television or computer display typically refers to the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. Some commentators also use this term to indicate a range of input formats that the display's input electronics will accept and often include formats greater than the screen's native grid size even though they have to be down-scaled to match the screen's parameters. An example of pixel shape affecting "resolution" or perceived sharpness is displaying more information in a smaller area using a higher resolution, which makes the image much clearer.
One problem people face when starting out with digital photography is how to touch up raw digital images. Perhaps an image is slightly dark, perhaps it has to be rotated or cropped. Maybe some dirty spots have to be cleaned out and erased. Digital photos usually require some form of manipulation before final output, unless, of course one takes a perfect picture. The first step is to find an image editor. For beginners, a program that has easy, simple tools will do just fine. More advanced people can move on to more complicated programs. There are many pictures that you've probably taken that would've looked great except for the red-eye. Just about every graphics program has a red-eye removal, so that no matter what level your program is you'll be able to remove the red-eye. However, in order to prevent it in the first place, it helps to know what causes it. Red-eye is caused by the flash reflecting to the back of the eyes all the way to the retina, and the red comes from the blood vessels in the eye. Therefore, if you flash a light in the eyes of your subject, this will cause the pupil to contract, and then there won't be any red-eye.
Sometimes, clear lines that separate the images in the panorama may appear. It is possible to blend the lines so that they disappear. Select the Advance Blending option located at the right of the Photomerge window, then select Preview. Inconsistencies in color will be calculated by the program. At this point, the images will blend together. Photoshop will combine all the individual images for your panoramic into a single layer. If you select the Keep as Layers option it is easier to edit each image individually. This is a great help if one of the images is brighter or darker then the other images. You can select that image in layers and adjust the brightness for just that image. It is a good idea to save the layers as a .psd file so that you can always come back and correct any mistakes or make any changes later. It's a real pain to have to redo everything from scratch just if you made a mistake or want to change something later. You can also distort the pictures so that the scene will look like it is in perspective. Choose the Perspective option on the bottom of Settings. You can also do this by choosing Set Vanishing Point in the Photomerge window, then click to an area in the panorama.
Look sharp. Be sharp. But keep your hands off the "sharpening" menu. You'll notice that I did not tell you to sharpen the image in the list of things to do above. Why? Because that's how most pictures get ruined. Sharpening can't be undone. Sharpening should be the very last thing you do to an image before you print it or place it in an on-screen album. Do NOT sharpen an image before saving it. If you decide you want to return to the picture later to edit it some more, you'll be in a pickle. Do all your sharpening on temporary copies that you are planning to print or send to the Web. Don't be judge and jury. If you're not sure whether one of your images looks better or worse after editing, ask someone else to take a look. Show side-by-side versions, before and after your editing. Don't start a family argument if your spouse (or, worse yet, your 9-year-old) says you have no talent. Be honest about what others see.
At times the subject of a picture is lost in the surrounding parts of a picture. If this happens, you can always crop your picture. This means cutting down the picture to a certain size. There are many ways to do this in terms of the size of cropping. In just about every photo editing program there is a cropping tool, and you can experiment with the size of the area that you take out of your photograph. If you don't like what you've done, all you have to do is click "undo."
Begin a new way towards editing digital photos editing digital photos now. Start reading a great report on skin blemishes start fixing your photos now!
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