Get more secrets to Editing Digital Photography

By David Peters


Image editors (also known as photo editors) allow you to create and modify graphics and photographic images. This includes tasks such as painting and drawing, color correction, photo enhancement, creating special effects, converting images, and adding text to graphics. Your image editor will probably be your most frequently used tool for working with graphics so it should be flexible and intuitive. Many software programs are available for enhancing and otherwise working with bitmap images, but unless they can perform all of the tasks above sufficiently, they should only be considered as companion tools to your primary photo editing application.

Possibly one of the most confusing aspects of dealing with digital imagery is resolution-specifically, what it really is and how changing it affects an image. Simply put, image resolution is the number of pixels displayed per unit of printed length in an image. It's a measurement used for printing and it's usually stated in pixels per inch (ppi-used when referencing screen images) or dots per inch (dpi-used in printing because printers print dots). The way resolution affects an image is thus: For a given number of pixels in the width or height of an image, the higher the resolution, the closer the printer packs those pixels together in order to make a beautifully smooth and sharp print. The closer the pixels are packed together, the smaller the image will be physically when printed, and vice versa. Because our monitors can only display a certain amount of information that our eyeballs/brains can process, resolution matters only to printing devices. That's right, it doesn't mean a hill of beans until that image is headed for a printer because only a printer can do anything with the resolution measurement.

While it might be neater to store digital images, you aren't done with organizing and storing images. There are various options for data storage, and no one answer is right for everyone. In fact, there may be more than one right answer for you. However you store your images, be sure to file them so they are easy to organize and find. Choose one system and stick to it. Create named folders on your hard drive or name compact discs, for instance, to store them. ALWAYS make copies of your images, leaving the originals intact, before you edit, alter or crop them. The hard drive is where most people store the bulk of their images. This is a good option, but isn't without problems. For instance, if you have all of your images on your hard drive and it crashes, you've lost all your precious images. A horrible thought, of course! Do use the hard drive, but also back up all images right as you transfer them to the hard drive by any secondary method. The compact disc is a wonderful way to store images; it can be rather efficient and it is relatively easy to set up. The downside is you need a CD-burner to use this method. If you do have one, simply keep a running backup of all your images. Be sure to pay special attention to organization so you don't wind up popping ten CDs in just to hunt down one photo. When you burn a new CD of images, write down the dates and descriptions of the photos on the CD. Or name the CDs and keep a notebook that lists what is on each CD. Better yet, make an index print of images on each CD and write the name on top of the print.

When photos are saved on a computer, they frequently become slightly blurred. They are not necessarily so blurry that you can't see the image; they are merely not as clear as they could be. Just about all photo-editing programs have a tool that allows you to sharpen your image. When your image could use some sharper detail, this is the option you want to use. It makes for a much better-looking picture. Some cameras have the tool built in, though sometimes that is not enough, and it may have to be done again with your editing software.

Sharpen filters bring out detail in images by increasing the contrast of pixels next to one another. More advanced image editing programs offer several options such as Sharpen, Sharpen More, Sharpen Edges and Unsharp Mask (USM). Unsharp Mask gives you a lot of control over how an image is sharpened. Sometimes a photo will benefit from selective sharpening. You select an area with a programs selection tool and only sharpen the area. The important thing is not sharpen an image too much. The sharpening tool that is most useful for photographs is the Unsharp Mask, now available in most raster programs. The Unsharp Mask searches through your image looking for where colors change, and sharpens those areas. The Unsharp Mask is superior to any other sharpening because it makes decisions based on adjacent pixels, not random color changes, so it usually can find and sharpen just the true edges of color areas.

Often times images are posted on the web and resized with HTML code. This leads to an image full of jagged edges. By resizing your image in an image editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop, you can utilize smoothing algorithms that will make an image look much smoother. Additionally, resizing the image will reduce the file size, allowing a web page to load faster than usual. When you resize an image, you are resampling an image. In other words, your program is taking all of the image data and redrawing the pixels so that the image is the desired size. However, when you ask the application to increase the size of the image, the size of each pixel is increased, which inevitably leads to degradation of the image. When you resize an image, you can also change image resolution, to keep the quality of your image.

Cropping is the process of selecting and removing a portion of an image to create focus or strengthen its composition. Even the best photographers will often get back to their computers to view their photos and find that they are not ideal for one reason or another including distracting background elements, framing mistakes, or unbalanced images. While the temptation might be to delete such images the beauty of shooting in the digital format is that editing images after shooting them is relatively quick and easy. Cropping is one option for fixing such problems. This is usually done in photo editing software. Cropping images give you a second chance to frame your images. While you can never really add to the photograph to put more space around your subject (or recover the ear you clipped), cropping the image even tighter can take the focus away from the clipped part of your subject and make the image quite dynamic.

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