Learning how to edit digital photography can be easy

An image editor is a computer program that enables you to adjust a photo to improve its appearance. With image editing software, you can darken or lighten a photo, rotate it, adjust its contrast, crop out extraneous detail, remove red-eye and more. Most graphics programs have the ability to import and export one or more graphics file formats. Several graphics programs support animation, or digital video. Vector graphics animation can be described as a series of mathematical transformations that are applied in sequence to one or more shapes in a scene. Raster graphics animation works in a similar fashion to film-based animation, where a series of still images produces the illusion of continuous movement.

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.

The best thing about digital cameras is that it’s easy to take thousands of pictures. That’s also the worst thing about digital cameras. After you’ve owned your camera for a few months, you won’t be able to find that great picture you took a couple of months ago if your pictures aren’t well organized or named logically. Folders are the best way to organize groups of pictures, and the My Pictures folder is a great place to start. In your My Pictures folder, create a subfolder for each year: 2004, 2005, 2006, and so on. This might seem silly the first year you own your camera, but after five years, you’ll be glad you did this because you can go back to your 2005 folder and easily find a picture from a vacation you took that year. Arranging pictures by year is also helpful if you’re scanning older photos stored in shoe boxes or albums that you took before owning a digital camera. This is also a good way to start organizing the pictures that you currently have on your computer.

With a photo-editing program, you can “fix” or change images acquired from a scanner, digital camera, or the Internet and print them, import them into another document, post them on a Web page and use them for desktop backgrounds. To make the choice that’s right for you, check reviews in computer magazines and on the Internet to narrow your choices; look for a program that can directly import images from a scanner or digital camera; make sure the program can crop, resize, flip and rotate images; compare color adjustment capabilities of programs. You should be able to adjust contrast, brightness, sharpness, hues and color-saturation levels; change a color; and convert color to black-and-white or grayscale; and compare the ease of using the various programs available.

Sharpening is one of the most impressive transformations you can apply to an image since it seems to bring out image detail that was not there before. What it actually does, however, is to emphasize edges in the image and make them easier for the eye to pick out — while the visual effect is to make the image seem sharper, no new details are actually created. The first step in sharpening an image is to blur it slightly. Next, the original image and the blurred version are compared one pixel at a time. If a pixel is brighter than the blurred version it is lightened further; if a pixel is darker than the blurred version, it is darkened. The result is to increase the contrast between each pixel and its neighbors. The nature of the sharpening is influenced by the blurring radius used and the extent to which the differences between each pixel and its neighbor are exaggerated.

At times the subject of a picture is lost in the surrounding parts of a picture. If this happens, you can always crop your picture. This means cutting down the picture to a certain size. There are many ways to do this in terms of the size of cropping. In just about every photo editing program there is a cropping tool, and you can experiment with the size of the area that you take out of your photograph. If you don’t like what you’ve done, all you have to do is click “undo.”

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.