Posts Tagged ‘Photos’

Printing your Photos at Home – Useful Tips and Hints for Best Quality

Monday, December 26th, 2011

Digital photography revolutionized the way in which we take, view and share photos and also the way in which we print them. Many digital photos never get printed but there are still many of us who prefer tangible paper prints. Photos can be printed using a professional service (in-store or online) or at home. In this article we will give you tips for getting quality prints at home.

A few years ago getting high quality prints at home was an expensive task that was only suitable for semi-professionals who could afford it and who had the know-how. Today low cost printers can generate amazing quality prints and sophisticated software can do most of the processing work behind the scenes. The result is that even amateur photographers can generate very high quality prints by pressing a single Print button.

There are a few simple tips to follow that can help in getting higher quality prints:

Edit your photos: make sure that you print exactly the photo that you want printed. Using simple photo editing tools (such as Photoshop or even Windows built-in Paint application) you can crop a photo to include just the area you are interested in or crop out parts which you do not want in the print. For example you took a photo of a group of friends but on the left corner of the photo there is a bystander that just happened to be there. You can crop the photo to include only your friends and thus effectively eliminate the unwanted object from the print.

When cropping photos always remember aspect-ratio – depending on the paper and the printer you’re using sometimes you’re limited to a certain photo size. For example if you print on a special 4X6 photo paper any source photo that is not in a 4X6 aspect ratio will have to be either stretched, cropped or parts of the print will be left blank. Make sure that you crop your photo to fit a specific aspect ratio if you’re printing on a specific aspect-ratio paper.

More photo processing can be done in order to enhance your prints. It can include red-eye removal (many software packages will do it for you automatically) contrast enhancement and more. For example if a portion of the photo that is important to you is a bit dark – you can “stretch” the color palette in a way that this section will look more lit and detailed. This will usually be on the expense of “overexposing” other portions of the photo that you care less about.

Always remember photo resolution: Every photo is built out of pixels. The more pixels in a photo the higher the photo resolution is. We will not get into details here about the correlation between mega pixels and print quality but a general rule of thumb is that to get good print quality you need 300 pixels per inch or more. This means for example that the biggest paper size a 2 mega pixels photo can be printed on is 4X6 while an 8 mega pixels photo can be printed on an 8X10.

Pick the right printer and paper: there are many different printing each with its advantages and disadvantages. They range in quality and cost. To get the best print quality you should use photo paper in conjunction with a printer that supports such paper. Photo paper and photo printers are more expensive than document oriented A4 Inkjet printers. Choose the printer by evaluating how many prints you will make and how important quality is to you. If you print occasionally for fun an Inkjet printer with normal or photo paper is probably good enough for you. If you print a lot and quality is very important photo paper with a photo printer is the way to go. As a rule of thumb glossy photo paper provides the best quality for color photo prints while matte photo paper provides the best quality for black and white prints.

Printer ink and maintenance: printers need to be setup and maintained. It is extremely important to follow the instructions and to use compatible ink cartridges. High quality compatible ink can make the difference between low and high quality prints. It is usually recommended to buy ink from the same brand as the printer. Some calibration is usually needed when replacing ink and sometimes every few months of use. Follow the instructions for such procedures carefully as a calibrated printer results in much better quality prints than a printer that is not aligned and is poorly maintained.

In conclusion it is very easy to print your photos at home. Just buying a mid-range printer and hitting the “Print” button in your photo viewing software will probably result in good prints that are satisfactory for most consumers. Following some simple tips can enhance those prints to professional quality. As technology advances and prices go down experimenting at home with various photo processing tools, paper sizes, paper types and inks becomes affordable and is probably the best way to find what combination yields the best print quality for you.

Sharing Photos Made Easier with Ritzpix Coupon Codes

Friday, December 23rd, 2011

We all love taking photographs — whether for a hobby, profession or just to capture unforgettable moments and preserve memories. The same joy and excitement goes with keeping and sharing pictures with loved ones and friends wherever they are in the world. Nothing equals the thrill of being able to beautifully create, edit, and share memorable photos that you hold dear. And what’s even more surprising is exploring the endless possibilities of photography online, linking people everywhere, and building easy connection anytime.

Each day is a chance to weave beautiful stories preserved in hundreds of photographs you can collect through the course of time. Imagine all the photos you can take in a minute, in an hour, and in a day that you want to neatly keep and organize. Along with this is the desire to be able to adjust and enhance all the pictures the easiest way, practically sharing them with the people you care about.

Experience the wonders of photography when you avail of Ritzpix coupon codes that let you enjoy the convenience of creating, editing and sharing photo albums online. Ritzpix is the fastest and most practical way to stay in touch with friends and family without worrying about the safety and security of your well-treasured photos. This definitely makes bonding more fun and meaningful as everything is made easy when it comes to improving your pictures and storing them online. Simply register for your free account, upload your digital photos, and choose a sharing method.

You’re in for the coolest treats and only the best deals when you avail of Ritzpix promotional codes. You don’t only get to enjoy the abounding perks; your family and friends can benefit as well. Share your photos and give away free prints every time you send photo albums online at Ritzpix. Surprise friends and family with free digital prints of any photos you share. What’s even cool about this is that pictures are ready in an hour.

Here’s another treat. You can have fun not only with your pictures but with your favorite videos and music as well. Ritzpix now allows you to enjoy sharing your online photo albums with Spark Zooms, the new animated slideshow tool. Go beyond the magic of photography when you add music, videos, text, and more to create a truly unique and personalized story using your online photo albums.

Take advantage of all the rewards you can get when you avail of Ritzpix promo codes that let you enjoy big discounts, saving up to 80% with its free shipping. Amazingly, prints and all products are available in just an hour at the nearby store.

Imagine the multitude of possibilities you can do with your photographs when you subscribe to Ritzpix, giving easy access to user-friendly online photo editing tools where you can crop, rotate, remove red eye, and adjust contrast and brightness of all your online photos. From enhancing your pictures, you can also create interesting cards, cool calendars, unique gift creations or your very own photo book.

Ritzpix gives you more than just big storage online; it provides you the opportunity to make your photos simply remarkable. And you can make this happen when you activate your Ritzpix coupon codes now.

Taking Digital Photos for Online and Printed Product Catalogs

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

Whether you are planning to build an online product catalog or a printed version including rich digital photos will enhance it and will increase potential sales. When building a catalog photos are a powerful tool that you must use. Here are a few tips for taking digital photos that will bring justice to your products and will help increasing sales.

Product catalogs that do not include photos are boring. For example imagine that you are looking to buy a new digital photo printer. You just found a new online catalog or got a catalog via regular mail. The catalog has plenty of digital photo printers and also a lot of information about them such specifications, capabilities descriptions and more but it does not have any photos of the printer. You are most likely going to dump that catalog and search for the printer in another place.

This behavior is common to most consumers especially in this era of immediate gratification and impatience. Consumers do not want to spend time reading and figuring out what the product can do. They want to see a photo and get a short snippet of what the main features of the product are and what the price is.

Just taking photos and adding them to your catalog is not enough. Good photos can add a lot to a product image but at the same time bad photos can really damage that image. Here are some tips and concepts that can help taking good photos that in turn help selling products online:

Variation: Take more than one photo. Show the product from many angles: zoomed in and zoomed out and in different positions for example if the product is a clamshell-phone you should show it both in the opened and closed positions.

Quality: The photo quality must be as high as possible. Don’t confuse quality with file size or resolution we refer here to photographic quality: Follow the rules of good photography, use a tripod when long exposure is needed make sure the photo is not overexposed or underexposed and that it is not blurry.

Background: It is very important to shoot with the appropriate background. Usually you would stage a background that is in contrast with the product and that has no details or distracting objects that can catch the viewer’s attention. Make sure that the background is matte color and that it does not reflect light. For example when taking a photo of a black digital photo printer use a white or light gray background.

Show details: Emphasize the product details. Every product has unique features or important details that you would like to draw the viewer’s attention to. The best way to do that is to take close-up photos of those details. You are not limited to physical details for example when selling an digital photo printer that has long battery life take a close-up photo of the digital photo printer’s LCD screen displaying how much battery is left. Such a photo conveys credibility and is much more powerful than the product battery life specifications text.

Support the product description: Take photos that support the textual description of the product. For example if the text claims that the digital photo printer comes in three colors: black, silver and red show three photos of the printer in those colors.

Convey physical attributes: If your product has unique physical attributes that you would like to emphasize take photos that convey them. For example if the product size is important use a known size object in order to help the viewer visualize the size take a photo of the digital photo printer next to a quarter coin to show how small the printer is. It is much easier for viewers to visualize and understand measurements if they are put in reference with objects they know very well. This is much more powerful than specifying inches and ounces in a textual specification.

Keep file sizes small: This is relevant for online catalog only. Keep the photo file size small. When viewing a photo on a computer screen low resolution photos are more than enough. In most cases a VGA (640X480) picture is all that is needed and such a photo file size can be 50Kbytes or less. It is important to keep this in mind and not be tempted to put high resolution big photos files. Such big files load slowly on the viewer’s computer and in most cases the viewer will get frustrated from the slow response and would just skip to the next site.

Correcting the Color and Contrast of the Digital Photos

Saturday, December 17th, 2011

Can you edit the digital photo perfectly? Commonly, this task will require certain software and you should master the basic system of the software if you want to get the best result. Anyway, you should never feel worry since can be quite easy task to do. The following explanation will tell you more about the very basic things in editing the digital photo, especially the steps to correct the contrast and color. There are many different brands which offer the best digital cameras, but the best one will bring the complete features for you.

The old photos have faded and you want to make it looks good as the first time the photos were taken. This is the great idea since the old photos are commonly faded, darkened and probably discolored with age too. The digital photo-editing software will help you to repair and restore your precious photographs easily. Basically, there are many things you need to deal with such as the brightness, contrast, the saturation and also the sepia-tones. The brightness adjustment will enable you to lighten up the dark photos.

Further, the brightness will deal with overall contrast. The next thing you need to know is saturation. In this case, the saturation tool will help you to turn back the clock and provide the photos with more richness and depth. The last thing is about the Sepia-tones. This is the great tool to give the antique tough to your black & white photo. The color photograph should be converted into grey scale. The next step is selecting the duo tone and finally chooses your two colors. In fact, the brown shades are very popular for this effect). Another possible thing to deal with is about the sharpness. This is the important fact in editing. If you wish to scan the photo, make sure to choose the best scanner.

Send Photos to India

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Normal 0

Shot great photos? Want to Send Photos to your folks in India?

 

Now, face the real challenge. Organizing, Printing, Editing, and Sharing your photos. This can be trickier than just mouse clicks – especially if your stack comprises of high-resolution images and low Internet bandwidth.

 

Never mind, Online Digital Photo Printing, Online Photo Sharing, and Online Digital Photo Editing from 16Frames is making things more exciting than before. Whatever your need, if you are looking to print, share, organize and present your snaps, a new breed of online applications and innovative tools from 16Frames are at your fingertips, ready to be explored.

 

16Frames is the only online provider meeting your Online Photo Printing and Online Photo Sharing needs and physically delivering them to anyone in India. Photos of your son’s first walk or snaps of your new home or any other special moment, we promise to deliver them to your loved ones doorstep in India. Send Pictures to India with us and you get Quality Photo Prints on Kodak Professional Photo Printing paper and we use reliable courier service.

 

16Frames is a leading Online Photo Printing service provider. We also offer Online Photo Storage, Online Photo Sharing, and Online Photo Editing service. Apart from Online Digital Photo Prints you can also send Send Photo Gifts to India, Send Greeting Cards to India, and Send Videos to India.

 

At 16Frames customers can upload any number of photos with a single mouse click using our Multi-Photo Uploader. Customers can edit, modify, enhance, and apply special effects to their pictures using our Online Photo Editor. We offer very low prices and Unlimited Photos Storage space and Unlimited Photo Sharing. And yes, you can keep your photos private to a restricted user group – such features make your online experience productive and fruitful. All these tools are at your fingertips. You can test drive all these features online at http://www.16frames.com/Test/TestUploadPhotos.aspx

 

16Frames is the ultimate digital sharing machine that provides users a way to upload, share, print, and deliver digital photos and a number of other imaging products. It provides a wide range of options at very competitive prices. We also offer a number of freebies.

 

16Frames offers the lowest prices in the Industry. We charge 10 Cents for 4 x 6″ Photos Prints, 10 Cents for 4 x 6″ Photos Prints, 22 Cents for 5 x 7″ Photos Prints, 25 Cents for 6 x 8″ Photos Prints, 69 Cents for 8 x 10″ Photos Prints, and .99 for a Photo Slide Show.

 

Send Photos to India now to your family and friends in India just by uploading Online at 16Frames.com and you will get 10 FREE Photo Prints on every order. 16Frames is the ONLY provider offer 10 FREE 4 x 6″ prints one every 4 x 6″ Photo Prints Order to India.

 

16 Frames is also giving away 5 FREE Photo prints to people referring friends and family members. Free Photo prints are limited to 4 x 6″ print size only. Referral Free Photo Prints will be credited in to your account (5 free photo prints per referral), on a one-time-only basis, on each referral placing their first order. Just login and you can always check the remaining free Photo Prints in your account.

 

16Frames offers a FREE slideshow of all your photos, in your order, on a CD. You pay only for the shipping expense.For more detailed information please visit us at http://www.16frames.com

 

The Photos Which Sell Best On Microstock Photography Sites

Monday, December 12th, 2011

One of the most common questions I am recently asked here at TurnPhotosIntoCash.com is \”which photos will actually sell best on microstock photography sites?\”. By now you are probably aware that I have no problems in giving away great ideas about how to sell photos, which will help anybody to begin earning money immediately, however this question is a bit of a secret amongst stock photographers

Today\’s successful stock photographers rarely share the secrets to their success, undoubtedly as they fear that the market will become flooded and they in turn won\’t make as much money. In the past I have heard of winning ideas and, as always, have posted them immediately to the web site to share them with my readers.

A common sense approach to earning a lot of money quickly is to choose a subject matter that is in high demand, and fortunately there are a variety to choose from. Currently anything business or technology related as well as photos of children or wildlife are in high demand. Obviously there are other opportunities that have yet gone undetected, however the ones I have listed should give you a good lead to start earning money from your collection of digital photos.

If you live in far away places you can also take advantage of the current interest in exotic locations as well as increasing interest in exotic plants and plant life. Anybody who is US based can still try to get into this market with photos of flowers, herbs and other interesting plants. Really you only need to open your eyes out their, and you will begin to see the real beauty than you can capture on film with just a click of a button.

Since I have already talked about nature I want to focus your attention on the concept of taking photos, with an eye on their uniqueness. Take for example Sunsets, Sunrises, cloud formations, pets, and crowd scenes. The main factor to money making photos will be seen in these types of photos., as they are virtually always unique, and this type of photo will always sell well on Microstock photography sites.

50th Anniversary Party – How to Use Photos to Make a Golden Anniversary Shine

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

Any couple that has lasted fifty years in a solid marriage deserves an anniversary party.  This is an achievement worth celebrating.  And the best way to highlight a half century of life, love and memories is to showcase photos that tell the couple’s story.  Here are some of the best ways:

Photo Anniversary Invitations

Put your guests in the mood to share the memories with a photo anniversary invitation.  You can scan the anniversary couple’s wedding photo, edit it on your computer, add the what, when and where information, and print it at home.  Or you can leave it to the professionals and order your photo anniversary invitations online.  If you choose this option, look for a company that has designs you like and can add both their wedding picture and a current one.  Shop around the internet a little and you’ll find beautiful photo invitations at very reasonable prices.

Photo Anniversary Favors

A small gold frame with the happy couple’s wedding photo makes an elegant memento of the occasion.  You could also pick up some pocket 4×6 photo albums available at dollar stores and craft stores, then fill them with copied or photocopied pictures from the couple’s life.

How about photo anniversary bookmarks as keepsakes for your guests?  It’s something everyone can use, is inexpensive, and can also contain both the wedding photo and a current one.  Order these online and you might find a company that offers photo bookmarks that match the design to their photo invitations for a coordinated look.  Just do some browsing, and you’ll find photo coasters, magnets, pocket mirrors, notebooks and just about everything else imaginable.

Photo Anniversary Decorations

For a no-fuss, easy way to extend your photo theme, set up a photo table at the anniversary party.  On the table, place the couple’s old wedding album and lots of family photo albums.  Your guests will enjoy looking through them.

To take it a step further, make copies or photo copies of photos that represent important stages in the couple’s life together.  On large posterboard or foam board, make a collage from the photos and display.

Or you can make enlargements of those significant photos, anything from 8×10 to poster size, depending on your budget, and hang them from wide gold ribbons.  Place them around the room in chronological order for a stunning exhibition of their 50 years together.

Another fun idea is to make photo placemats for the tables.  Make a collage from copies of photos and have a print shop enlarge it to placemat size.  They will then print and laminate the placemats.

Photo Anniversary Cakes

If you want a great finale to the evening, a cake with the couple’s wedding picture is a real show stopper.  The photo is imprinted onto the icing with safe, tasteless food dyes.  You should be able to find a local bakery that offers these cakes.  Speaking of desserts, you can also find photo cookies and photo chocolates using the same method, and they are available online.

Photo Anniversary Memory Book

No fiftieth anniversary party should end without a heart-felt gift for the couple.  And one of the most meaningful gifts is a scrapbook filled with their memories.  Ask everyone who attends the party to contribute.  Give each person or couple a page to fill out.  Keep the size of the page small, either a 6×6 or 8×8 album page is good.  Instruct them to add a photo that the anniversary couple might not have in their possession.  Then ask them to write a personal message under the photo.

To make it even easier, add photo corners to the page, so they can just pop in their photo.  And instead of asking them to think up a few words, give them a “fill in the blank”.  Some examples would be, “I’ll never forget when Bill and Jean____” or “my fondest memory of Bill and Jean was when ____”.  You can mail them the blank pages before the party and have them bring them to the event.  Or you can ask them to bring a photo and fill out the page at the party.  Not everyone will cooperate, but you’ll still get a lot of great responses.  And the anniversary couple will be profoundly touched by this memory book prepared with so much love and affection.

Fill their 50th anniversary with photos.  Your guests will be delighted as they walk down memory lane.  And the happy couple will have the chance to relive those precious moments that made up their lives together.  It’s a chance for everyone to reminisce and a wonderful way to celebrate such a monumental occasion.

3 Fireproof Ways Of Protecting Your Family Photos

Sunday, November 27th, 2011

It is probably one of our greatest fears of loss, to be standing amidst the burnt out remains of what used to the place where our family home once stood. The absolute devastation of not know where to start in putting the pieces all back together, personal keepsakes, important documents, your clothes, insurance papers, financial information and your photos all lost.

Devastating.

Okay so you are glad to be alive, to have gotten your family and pets out safely, you can be thankful to God for this, but this is a situation that you never thought you would find yourself in. Doesn’t this just happen to other people?

Yes this does happen to other people, in the wake of the recent tragic Australian bus fires that swept through Victoria and at a pace so ferocious that caused the destruction of over 700 homes and claimed almost 200 lives. It is something that is happening more and more as our planet’s temperature continues to rise.

Listening to some of the survivors stories, you hear over and over again how many of them lost their treasured family memories, that were taken away in the flash of the flames. Pictures of ancestors from past generations, those dear sweet photos of the grand children and the precious moments when your own children were young, your own wedding day – all gone.

One thing that stood out as a major contributing factor in the high numbers of lives lost in these fires was the speed at which properties and people were caught by the flames rapid onset. Being able to get everyone out including the last dash back to the house to get the photos albums was not a privilege afford by many, in fact some reports indicate that this one act may have contributed to the loss of some peoples lives.

Tragic.

So How Do We Get Better Prepared For Such Events?

3 Ways to Protect Your Family Treasures

Method One – Back Up Your Photos To CD or DVD

The first way to ensure that your family photos are safe in the event of a fire or hurricane, or tornado is to have them backed up and stored off site.

You can have your photos scanned on to your home computer if they are original prints, then saved to a CD or DVD and stored with a relative.

This method is fairly inexpensive to do but the downside is you need to be vigilant in remembering to do the scan or save to your computer from your digital camera and then on to the removable media CD or DVD for storage.

This method is the most time consuming.

The Second Way Photo Backup the Free Method

The second method is to use a free photo sharing service such as Flickr or Picasaweb to store your photos online. The advantage with using such a service you can get into the habit of uploading all your photos to online web albums that you can easily with friends and relatives.

Your friends are able to download your photos and have prints made for themselves, which in itself is another level of extra insurance that your photos are going to survive come what may.

The only downside to the free method of online photo backup is that you can never be sure that your photos will not be removed or lost from their servers. In fact many stories can be found of people who have used free photo back up or sharing sites as their only source of their photos, and had all their memories swiped.

Some of us may be familiar with the process here, when we are uploading our photos from our cameras memory we are asked if we want to delete the originals or keep them. Don’t know about you but I always click to delete. Now this method is okay if you them stored on your home computer as well as your photo sharing back up website service but some people for want of space saving have deleted their home copies.

Another problem associated with most things free on the web these days is advertising. If you don’t want your photos sharing their web space along side of annoying advertising then you may need to consider my suggestion of the third way of ensuring your photos survive.

The last and perhaps the most prevalent and offensive an issue you will no doubt come up against on the free photo sharing sites is the presence of pornographic images and advertisements that people upload. In fact when doing my research for this article I was confronted by an overwhelming amount of sexually explicit materials both video and still images, that left my stomach churning with disgust.

As they say, like all things in life, “you get what you pay for” and in this case not paying you get more than you bargained for. And it stands to reason that these free sites just don’t have the staff or resource to ensure the porn is kept out as they only make money from their ads.

The Third Way To Safe Back Up Photos – Paid Photo Storage

It may come as no surprise that the third way to achieve safe, secure and guaranteed backup of your treasured family photos is to use a photo storage website that charges a small fee, of around per year is the same as about .10c a day. Not bad insurance for your life most treasured memories.

All the advantages of online easy to upload storage that in some cases is unlimited, as the free websites usually limit your photos storage amounts so you eventually run out, but not on the paid service websites, it is usually all you upload you can store.

Of course there are no annoying advertisements, the pornography is strictly excluded by the vigilant staff, so you can rest assured that the photos of your daughters 5 birthday party you send to your aunt in Sassquandicha are not going to be presented alongside an ad for an adult xxxx rated website.

There are many of the paid services to choose from but from my research the very best at this point in time would have to be Smug Mug. They have the best and easiest to use service I have found. They even come with a free 14 day trial that allows you to upload a few photos to test them out and see if they are as good as they claim to be.

I don’t’ know about you but if you are anything like me you are pretty tired of paying for things on the Internet that don’t work out. I know I am so the fact of being able to safely test the service before I pay, is paramount to me trying anything these days.

Free Trial and No Credit Card Required

Another good thing with the free trial is you don’t need to give any credit card details, just sign up and upload your photos.

So if safe, secure photo back up Is what will help you sleep better at night is what you are after then I can thoroughly recommend you check out the paid online photo sites for total peace of mind.

Editing Your Digital Photos – Some Important Tips

Saturday, November 26th, 2011

Dealing with digital technology will require people to understand some important thing to make sure that they will be able to operate it properly. The recent trend shows that people refer to choose the digital camera instead of the conventional one which requires the roll film and do not provide the facility to edit, delete, crop, or doing some other things. What about you? You will finally see that the best editing guideline is your only best solution. The following tips will tell you more about the digital photo editing technique.

The first thing you need to work with is the photo editing software. This step should be followed by selecting the certain photos you will edit. Make sure to use the copy version instead of the original one, since it is good to avoid the mistakes you can possibly do. The next important step is to crop your photo. You will use the crop tool if there is extra space in the photo. You should determine the purpose of the cropping. Perhaps, you wish to cut out the background of your photo or even focus in the only one person. The cropping result should be saved in different folder from the original pictures.

The next possible step is to fix the photo flaws. You will deal with the rips, creases, tears, spots and also smudges. Those things will be accompanied by the variety of handy fix-it tools. The creases, spots, tears and smudges are the common things people will adjust in the image editing programs. The copying or cloning tool will be helpful to fix photo flaws. What about the dust, speckles and scratches? It is important to set the radius until you get the lowest setting. This is the good step to avoid dust or scratches. Surely, there are still some other steps and facts you need to know. Editing the photos will let you to play with your creativity in adjusting the photos as you like and want.

How To Edit Photos – Easy Ways To Enhance Your Photos

Thursday, November 24th, 2011

Some people are just pro’s at taking great pictures. But most people just take average pictures. If you are one of them, you can edit photos in very easy ways and improve them dramatically.

Sure, you can have a good or great digital camera, adjust the settings as you are supposed to, and even produce a good picture. But sometimes it just doesn’t look quite as good as it could.

And even if it does look pretty good…pretty darn good…I would venture to say that with some simple photo editing, your picture can be great.

Here are the main types ways to edit photos which can greatly improve your images:

1. Saturation
2. Lightness and Darkness
3. Sharpening

Do you have to do all of them? Maybe. And maybe not. You can try each one to see if it enhances your image or not.

Saturation

This adjustment will make colors more vivid. How about making the sky in your landscape just a bit bluer and the grass a bit greener?

Most photo editing programs will adjust, or saturate, all elements in the photo. However, some of the more sophisticated ones will let you select areas to manipulate while leaving the rest of the picture alone. It all depends on which software you are using.

Be careful not to over do it, as your goal is to enhance it while still keeping it real looking. Saturate just a little bit at a time, and increase it if you feel it could use some more. You can always reverse your editing.

Brightness and Contrast

Sometimes a picture might come out too dark. By using this adjustment, you can lighten it up and make it brighter. Likewise, there are some images that need to darkened, or toned down. These manipulations can make a big difference in the quality of the photo. By adjusting the contrast, you can make a photo softer or more vivid.

Sharpening

This is something I try to be careful with. If you over sharpen, things can start to look jagged. In addition, sometimes a softer look can be very nice. You can sharpen slightly to see if this improves the image or not.

When editing, I like to use software that let you see the before and after images side by side. This helps in judging whether the picture is improved with each subsequent edit.

There are many free photo editing software programs that will work and be simple to use. If you want to really get involved in photo editing, you might also try one of the more sophisticated programs. They offer many more types of photo manipulations.

Some have a steep learning curve if you want to learn the more intricate manipulations. However, most of them let you start out in a simple way. If you find one that you feel you might like, see if they have a trial period so that you can try it out. Once again, many photo editing programs are free.

If you want to consider additional types of photo editing, here are a few you will find in most programs:

1. Cropping
2. Red-eye Removal
3. Resizing
4. Sepia
5. Highlights and Shadows – more sophisticated software
6. Exposure – more sophisticated software

  • Friends Sites