Digital Photography Basics - Types Of Photo Editors
Image editing software to a digital photographer is what 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.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 any change that is made to a picture. Photo manipulation is what photographers sometimes refer to as "trick photography" where you can do things like changing backgrounds and other things. (For some fun examples of photo manipulation, look up the "National Geographic Photo Foolery" page online.)
Before you choose a photo editor, you first want to understand the type of image editing you want to do. In this article, we"ll highlight the most popular ones:
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 tools such as retouch, which helps you remove blemishes, scratches, etc. Like many photo editors it has red eye remover. It also has fun applications like creating screensavers with your photos and integration 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 a professional photographer or graphic artist needs. 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 close competitor to Photoshop Elements and also runs about $90. They also offer a 30 day free trial.
The GIMP:
An odd name for such a powerful program, the acronym stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. This open source, freeware continues to improve and has a good community of users should 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. Ò
To get the best use out of your photo editor, look at its guide or help sections for an overview of what you can do with it, and then read the help sections on any new applications you want to try that aren"t 100 percent intuitive.
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 doesn"t.)
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.
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 long, you will be editing and producing quality photographs that you will be proud to hang on your wall.