| Check out these cool ways to edit your digital photos |
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| Hobbies - Photography |
| Written by David Peters |
| Wednesday, 17 September 2008 08:30 |
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Digital photo enhancement software aids you as you improve photos, sometimes when you think the picture is damaged beyond repair enhancement will amaze you. Original photographs are almost never perfect. The most frequently used enhancements are: the brightness and contrast enhancement and the color cast correction. The brightness and contrast enhancement is used to adjust the gamma levels and fix the colors in the picture. The color washer is helpful plugin that is an automated version of the contrast enhancement. Color cast corrections are useful to fix the coloring of the picture, especially if the picture has a yellowish tint. The color washer tool can also help you out with this problem. These enhancements will help you out with the color of your photo.
Digital photo enhancement software aids you as you improve photos, sometimes when you think the picture is damaged beyond repair enhancement will amaze you. Original photographs are almost never perfect. The most frequently used enhancements are: the brightness and contrast enhancement and the color cast correction. The brightness and contrast enhancement is used to adjust the gamma levels and fix the colors in the picture. The color washer is helpful plugin that is an automated version of the contrast enhancement. Color cast corrections are useful to fix the coloring of the picture, especially if the picture has a yellowish tint. The color washer tool can also help you out with this problem. These enhancements will help you out with the color of your photo. Today, one of the most commonly used tools is resizing a photograph. What is less heard of is re-sampling. What is the difference? Well resizing is just changing the pixels, while resample is using an actual algorithm to fix the picture so that is appears not blurry, fuzzy, blocked when it is changed. With resizing to enlarge a picture some of the pixels will be doubled. While with resizing, reducing an image some of the pixels will be thrown out; this why some lines of the photo just disappear. Re-sampling on the contrary, uses algorithms to decide the new size of the pixels, during an enlargement color will be added as a result of interpolation. While reducing an image the actual pixels will be re-calculated. A good image editor will include multiple algorithms for re-sampling and resizing options. Big question for everyone is how to convert photo files in order to get smaller pictures. This is really helpful if you want to send photo files over the internet. There are two ways to do this: the lossless and the lossy formats. Lossless means that the image stays exactly the same as it was originally. Basically different methods are applied to get a smaller but virtually untouched photo. The most common format that photo software can hand is .png. The disadvantage is the image can still end up too big, but the image will be completely unchanged. Lossy formats will actually lose some information. The advantage to this way is you will be able to pick the size you want it to end up in. The common form it is saved in is a .jpg. This will create small photos that will upload places quite easily. There are the ups and downs for both of these forms, basically do you want a smaller original or do you mind some of the photo being lost in order to make it really small. 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. When you want to you don't have do edit a whole bunch of images at a time. Having something that will control all the changes you want made to a large amount of images. If you want the images resizes it is very easy. There are bunch of types of batch processors. Each has its ups and downs, some photo viewers even have batch software that comes with them. A good example of what you want a batch processor to is have a large amount of images in one directory ready to go. Then you tell the software what to do, e.g. 50 images that need to be resized to 100 x 50 pixels then add a watermark and compress the image to 5kb to be transferred in email. Then you tell the program to run and within the next hour your images will be all ready to go. 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. Lots of questions come in everyday about different types of batch software, and other image processes here are a couple: Q: My photos have EXIF data, but no "taken date", how can it be ? A: Basic information like the date, aperture, shutter speed etc should be written into the EXIF data of the photo by any camera. "Normally" differences between camera makes should only be with the "makernotes". Makernotes are mostly completely different with different makes.Nevertheless some cameras seem to save EXIF data without saving the "taken date". The user who did report the problem did send me one of his photos. While the other EXIF fields (camera name, aperture, shutter speed etc...) were present, the EXIF date fields were empty. The camera of the user is a Nikon Coolpix 880. Now I do not pretend that every Coolpix 880 shows the same problem. It may be one out of a given series, it may only be the Coolpix 880's sold in a specific Country, it may even be that some fake (and unperfect) Coolpix 880's have found their way to the market. Who knows? Q: I can't find any way of getting my digital camera to work on my pc. A: With most digital cameras you get a pc software. This software is intended to be used to get the photos onto the pc and to do some other tasks too.Indeed most of these programs are not very convenient and you can easily go without ever using them. Easy ways to acquire your photos (i.e. get the photos onto the computer) are described at PC camera software or how to by-pass them to acquire photos. About the Author: Did you like this article? Interested in Dominating Photoshop? Well now you can by getting this free Tutorial...what are you waiting for? |