Some Quick and Easy Techniques for Editing

By David Peters


In Digital photography, enhancement is very helpful to help you edit your pictures. Sometimes an original looks so bad, it appears as if nothing can be done to help it. Not true! A couple commonly used enhancements are angle correction of slanted pictures and barrel and pincushion correction. The angle correction basically defines itself in the title. If the picture is slightly titled then the angle correction enhancement will help it out quite a bit. One thing the tool needs to have is anti-aliasing. Barrel and pincushion correction is used to fix slanted horizons that were caused by the camera being used to zoom up as far is could go. These enhancements are used mainly for generally annoying changes that some people wouldn't even notice unless it was dramatic, but are useful nonetheless.

To resize or to resample, that is the question. The answer to that question is really what your editor has and what you feel like doing. Resizing is a lot simpler than re-sampling but doesn't turn out as nice. This is because when you reduce an image with resizing a few pixels will be deleted altogether. When enlarging an image by resizing the pixels will be doubled or even tripled. This creates a fuzzy or blocky image. While re-sampling uses algorithms to either interpolate (enlarging the image by adding color to pixels) or reduce images by re-calculating all the pixels in the photo. Decent image editors will have a few algorithms for re-sampling and resizing will be an available option.

Lossy or lossless, this is the question of compression. Choosing compression formats is pretty easy; do you want the original image? Or do you want to be able to upload images to the web quickly and without worry? Lossless is for the people who want to the original, you can't pick what size the image will end up in but there will be no loss of the original image. Basically this is for if you want to be able to view the image but not send across the web. Lossy is all about easy transportation of images. You can pick the size of the image and transferring it is extremely easy and fast. Lossy generally ends up in the format of .jpg which is the most commonly read image format across the internet. Lossless ends up often in the .png format which is the most accepted format amongst average image software. When it comes down to deciding you have to think about whether you want it to be quickly accessible or completely original.

Viewing images is just as important as editing them. In order to easily access your images your photo viewer should be able to be customized, easily to use, have photo enhancement tools, printable contact sheets, convenient for attaining pictures, be able manage EXIF data and be able to batch process images. Some good ones are Zoner Photo Stuido which is quite user friendly. Another is Photophilia which is extremely adjustable and able to batch process. Selecting a photo viewer is important, depending on what kind of computer user you are you can select a viewer that is quick and easy or complicated but has some great functions. Some handy functions are: slide show, batch processor, editor functions, and zoom factor.

Lets say you want to have 100 images changed, well you don't want to do that manually. What if you wanted to do multiple thing, like resize add border, then compress them? That is a tedious and time consuming task. Well good news to you, that won't be time you have to waste. They have these nifty things called batch processors. Sometimes you have to download them separately others come with your photo viewer. All that processing and time consuming image changing would be done however long your batch software would be able to do it with. But no matter how long it takes, you don't have to do it. All that you need to do is queue it up in the program with takes 15-20 minutes max press the run button and all your images are being run through, changed and put in a new directory of your choice ready to go. Anytime you don't have to spend messing around with images the better. Choosing a batch program is pretty easy there are dozens out there just make sure it has what you want it to do.

A handy tool to have if you don't intend to collect thousands of pictures is a digital photo album. This is handy because you can add descriptions and make sure you get a nice looking album for people to look at. This is different from a photo view because it actually stores all the photos no matter where they are located. The program will actually go and find all your photos. This would not be recommended if you have more than 2,000 photos because if a file gets corrupted you could lose all your pictures. An online viewer would actually be useful because then after you used a batch processor you could upload them all to the site and have just as nice of an album online. In the end it is up to you whether even want an album in the first place.

Everyday many questions come in about the many processes with digital photography: Q: I had a hard drive crash. A recovery software program recovered a number of digital photos but for some reason saved them with the file extension ".PHB". Photoshop can't open this file so I can't change it. Any ideas? A: A file with an unknown and bad file extension should be renamed first. After that it can be opened again. Easy recipes to rename a file or to rename a bunch of files at Rename File Extension. Q: My roommate, thinking to help save space, compressed my photos and saved them at the new smaller size. How can I undo it? A: First it is important to note that photo compression and photo resizing are 2 completely different things. The short answer is that neither photo compression nor photo resizing can be undone, since a part of the original information is lost and can not be retrieved by magic. There is a more detailed explanation at Photo resizing versus photo compression.

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