Basic Photo Editing
When editing your photos it doesn’t matter what program you use. You can go from a great shot to an extraordinary shot in minutes if you learn the simple basics of the program you are working with. Have your preview checked, so that you can see the changes as you make them. It is helpful to toggle between the changes you are making and the orginal and compare the differences before you commit to the change.
Some of these basic funtions are…
• Brightness and Contrast, this is the shadows and highlights, you want to increase the contrast to make the image pop and control the brightness if your photo is over or under exposed.
• Hue and Saturation, simply hue is the color and its shade, saturation is how much of that color you apply.
• Adjust Levels this plots the number of pixels in the image and helps to adjust the brightness of your photo, this is good if the photo is under or over exposed.
• Add and Remove Noise, this is the graininess of the photo
• Sharpen and blur, while you cannot do much about removing camera motion blur you can add blur to soften the photo or sharpen the photo to make features stand out more.
• Clone Brush, this is a tool where you can fix a particular spot on the photo by coping one part of the image to another.
• Cropping
Learning how to use these features will greatly improve how you look at digital photography and how much you enjoy your photos. Applying more than one feature to help you achieve the effect you want. The help feature of the programs is a good place to learn about the different features your program offers; the manufactures websites usually has tutorials.
Compare the two photos, the left photo was direct from the camera, the right is after I did some basic photo editing.
Hue and Saturation to +30 this brought out the greens and deepened the blue of the sky.
Using the cropped the photo to remove the elbow from the left side and to center the catus more.
I also did a brightness of 0 and contrast of +33 to remove a slight haze that I thought the photo had.
Resources
landscape, digital photography, photo editing, tips
