Photo Editing Tips For Digital Photography

              

Digital Photography

Digital photography has a lot of advantages over film photography in many areas, but one of the most useful is the final output of the image itself. With film cameras you had to rely on the processing lab to make any general adjustments needed to your photos to make them appear their best, but with digital photos you as the photographer have all the tools you need to enhance and edit your own photos right at home.

Of course, how much editing you do to your photos before printing is entirely up to you and there are all kinds of preferences on photo editing from those that do almost no editing at all, to those who like to make major adjustments to almost every photo that they take. And there is plenty of middle ground in between those two extremes as well.

Quite often, many basic editing tasks can be done in the camera itself after the picture is taken including some simple cropping, removing red eye from flash photos, and rotation from landscape to portrait and vice versa. For many people, this is about all that they require anyway before printing out their snapshots, and this keeps things very easy and simple.

But to start to realize the potential that digital photography puts in the hands of the average person, a photo editing software program will be needed where you upload your photos from the camera to your computer and then open them in the program. You can then begin to perform all kinds of editing tasks including more advanced cropping, change the file size or format, adjust color saturation, contrast and brightness, and apply special effects.

There are several good free digital photo editing software programs available for download that can fit the bill for most common photo editing needs. All you have to do is perform a search for "free photo editing software" and you should have plenty of results to choose from.

But there are two programs for sale that seem to meet the needs of most average photographers whether novices or even serious hobbyists, and they are Adobe Photoshop Elements and Corel Paint Shop Pro 9. Both of these programs are very highly rated in most independent and consumer reviews as being very easy to learn and use, while also handling most any editing task that the average photographer could need.

For even more high end photo editing the full Adobe PhotoShop program will provide enough editing power to meet the needs and expectations of even the most discriminating photographers, but expect to pay quite a bit more for the added power and capability.

It should be clear then that regardless of the amount and scope of photo editing that you intend to do, there is a program that will let you do exactly what you want.

Advanced Photo Editing - Taking Photo Editing to the Next Level

Background Remove and Change

Mixing Basic with Intermediate Editing

The first thing that you need to learn about advanced photo editing, whether it is for portraits or non-portraits, is that you will never leave the basics behind. Instead you will need to balance these by adding on some intermediate editing techniques that will make your photo editing come up with better results. So instead of just adjusting the basic contrast and brightness of your photo, you could heighten this editing up a notch by putting in the exact amount of shadow and highlight details. The midtones should also be given attention as well so that your photo will have a balanced exposure that will increase its quality when it comes to its appearance.

Advanced photo editing could also include fixing the balance of your photo's colors. This involves shifting the temperature of the color, which could range from a cool tone that will give off a bluish tint or the warm tone that is seen with a yellow tint. You could also make use of tint slider for shifting the magenta and green colors in scenic photographs.

Using Background Removal

If you want to be serious about doing advanced photo editing, then you should also venture into other editing techniques like the background removal. If you are using Adobe Photoshop, there are many tools provided by this software that could help a lot in pulling out and changing the background of your photo. With the help of such tools as the background eraser, the magnetic lasso, the pen, and the channel mask, you can already pull out a non-presentable background and replace it with either a solid color or another background of your choosing. There are a great number of tutorials online that could help you get some advanced techniques in photo editing using Photoshop.

Doing Some Photo Manipulation

One of the oldest advanced photo editing techniques being used by photographers and even by those just dabbling in photography is photo manipulation. A partnership between graphic design and photography that is constantly evolving, photo manipulation is when photo-editing strategies are done to photos so that enhancements or corrections could be made or so that an illusion can come out as a result. If you are the kind of person who would like to come up with some photo art, then photo manipulation is the best photo editing technique that you must master. With this, you could do more complex editing that is not limited to changing the color or the background.