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Digital Photography Basics - Understanding The Types Of Photo Editing Software

For the digital photography enthusiast, becoming well acquainted with photo editing is one of the digital photography basics that can make a world of difference in how well a photograph turns out.

You can think of image software as the same to a digital photographer as the dark room is to a film photographer. The difference is that photo editing software makes photo editing something that anyone can do without setting up a darkroom.

And with photo editing software, you can do standard image editing functions like cropping and adjusting color, and can also do photo manipulation.

Image editing refers to any change that is made to a picture. Photo manipulation is what photographers sometimes refer to as "trick photography" where you can do things like changing backgrounds and other things. (For some fun examples of photo manipulation, look up the "National Geographic Photo Foolery" page online.)

Before you choose a photo editor, you first want to understand the type of image editing you want to do. In this article, we will highlight the most popular types of photo editing software so you can understand the differences between each of them.

Picasa: A free photo editor from Google. If you are just getting into the very basics of digital photography, this will serve you well for a while. It's really intended to be more of a photo manager and online photo album both very handy applications, but Picasa also handles the most basic editing. Picasa offers basic editing tools such as retouch, which helps you remove blemishes, scratches, etc. Like many photo editors it has red eye remover. It also has some fun functionality where you can create screensavers with your photos and even integrate them with Google Earth.

If you are ready to advance from the digital photography basics and do more with your pictures, then you should consider one of the following photo editors:.

Adobe Photoshop Elements: The market leader in photo editing and manipulation, it's more user-friendly and less costly (approximately $90) than its big brother, Photoshop CS4. It's good for the photography enthusiast plus there is a free trial version.

Adobe Photoshop CS4: This has everything you could possibly need as a professional photographer or graphic artist. It sells for about $700 on their website, but you can find it half that price by some vendors or look for a free trial version.

Paint Shop Pro: This is a close competitor to Photoshop Elements and also runs about $90. They also offer a free 30-day trial.

The GIMP: An odd name for such a powerful program, the acronym stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. This photo editor is open source (aka freeware) and continues to improve and has a good community of users if you need help. It is available for Unix/Linux platforms, as well as Windows (NT4/2000/XP/Vista) and Mac operating systems (OS X). It doesn't have everything you get with Adobe Photoshop CS4, but it does have more than Paint Shop Pro or Elements and is used by some professionals.

To get the best use out of your photo editor, look at its guide or help sections for an overview of what you can do with it, and then read the help sections on any new applications you want to try that aren't 100 percent intuitive.

It takes time to learn but you will be impressed with what you can do with your images.

For example, here are a just a few of the things you can accomplish (the top 5 even with just Picasa):

• Crop
• Resize
• Lighten or darken shadows, highlights, and midtones
• Correct Colors
• Remove blemishes, a stray branch, a logo, or anything else you don't want in the picture
• Blur Backgrounds (Photoshop Elements, Paintshop Pro and The GIMP all offer background-blurring applications. Picasa doesn't.)

You can also create all sorts of special effects with a photo editor. For example you can turn your photo into an impressionistic painting. You can also convert a color picture into a black and white image to better capture the tones and highlights.
Or for a more vintage or antique look, you can choose sepia.

And with photo editing software, you can also more easily create pictures that can go in any size picture frame whether it's a small picture frame or a 4x6 picture frame or larger.

Even if you don't want to do any cool special effects, learning the basics of any photo editor will let you fix "mistakes" in your photos. Just by cropping your picture can make a big difference in how your photograph turns out. That is why photo editing is an important part of learning the digital photography basics and why it's important that you learn it. Before you know it, you will be editing and producing quality images perfect for displaying in a metal picture frame.

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