Silent Devotion

One problem I faced when starting out with digital photography was how to touch up my raw digital images. Perhaps an image was slightly dark, perhaps it had to be rotated or cropped. Maybe some dirty spots had to be cleaned out and erased. Digital photos usually require some form of manipulation before final output. So here\’s a short guide which I\’ve compiled to help you touch up your photos.

Step 1: Start Up Your Image Editor The first step, of course, is to fire up your favorite image editing program. For beginners, it\’s best to get a program like Ulead PhotoImpact. It\’s a great tool that allows you to achieve professional photo effects using simple, easy-to-follow steps.

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 Don\’t be afraid to experiment with colors. Image editing programs put a lot of power in your hands. You can make the leaves purple, change the entire photo to black and white, add a sepia effect - almost anything you want. A good photo editing program will have automatic color balance options to adjust color defects in your pictures.

Step 5: Blurring Effects Some pictures can be enhanced by using a blurring effect. In this case you would select unimportant areas of the photo to softly blur out to draw more focus to the subject of the photo. An example would be to blur out the background leaves of a picture of a butterfly.

Step 6: Sharpen Up The next step in touching up a photo would be to sharpen as needed. While you cannot truly sharpen an out of focus image you can improve on it by selectively sharpening focal points. Sharpen a person’s eyes for example and leave the rest of the image unsharpened.

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 4×6 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 all there is to it! Now you have the basics for touching up and preparing your raw digital photos for output. While all of the above steps might not fit every photo situation, they are among the most common your might need. Experiment and practice with the different tools and options to make the most out of all of your digital images.