to Digital Camera Page

Have even more fun with your pictures after you've taken them.

After you've taken your digital photos, you must decide what your purpose is:

      Print
      Import into a document
      Upload to a website or email

It is usually best to take digital photos at a high resolution for printing, and then edit them if you want them smaller for internet use. A rule of thumb for resolution is:

Print: at least 200 dpi
Website and email: 72 dpi

These are the basic photo editing tasks:

    • Color Correction - Different programs handle this in different ways, from auto-correct to Red, Green and Blue sliders to curve and levels histograms
    • Brightness and Contrast - usually sliders
    • Crop - make a box around what you want to keep
    • Resize dimensions and resolution, usually to decrease size for web photos

Remember, always keep a copy of your original picture!

With some programs you can also do the following:

    • Sharpen or blur
    • Apply filters
    • Apply edges
    • Add text

Find tutorials for Photoshop photo enhancement at: http://epaperpress.com/psphoto/

Photoshop color correction using Levels at: http://www.leadingobject.com/seminars/bc/colorpage.html

Now that you have digital images downloaded into your computer, you may want to:

    • Organize them using file viewers or organizers
    • Make slide shows or collages
    • Import into documents or presentations
    • email to friends
    • use in making webpages

A screen shot of Photoshop

Commercial Photo Editing Software - These are robust programs with photo editing, effects, layers and text capabilities. New titles are coming out all the time.

Adobe Photoshop - The Big Daddy of photo editors. $650 retail, $300 with an academic discount, and $130 through http://www.oetc.org on a purchase order through the 8C school district and Bob Nelson.

Adobe Elements - A stripped-down Photoshop with enough options to last a long time, for about $100.

Ulead Photo Impact - Well done photo editing

Jasc Paint Shop Pro - a time-tested alternative to Photoshop, for about $100

Corel Photo Paint - Part of the Corel Graphics Suite

Serif Photo Plus - The low price leader, easy to use and with surprising features

Microsoft Picture It! - A large program with many options. It comes with Microsoft Home Office

Macromedia Fireworks - Dedicated to preparing graphic images for use on web pages.

Arcsoft - Arcsoft offers a number of titles for use with photo editing, including Photo Studio

 

Bundled Software - This type of software usually comes with a scanner or digital camera

Adobe Photodeluxe - A user-friendly photo editor with many of Photoshop's features

Ulead Photo Express

Microsoft Picture It Express

Kodak Easy Share - also available as a free download at the Kodak site (with registration)

HP Photo Smart

Many desktop programs such as Microsoft Publisher and Broderbund's Print Shop are beginning to include simple photo-editing features, such as crop, brightness and contrast, red eye, and color enhancement tools.

A screen shot of Vicman's Photo Editor

Freeware Downloads- These are downloads you can try. Some are feature-disabled in order to get you to buy the full program, but you can still get a lot of use out of these.

Irfan Viewer - One of my essential graphics programs, I install this on any computer I am currently using. A small viewer that can resize, convert to many other formats, and serve as an easy slide show.

The Gimp - Originally created for Linux, this program is as robust as Photoshop but is all accomplished through right-clicking your mouse! Download a version here. (Some downloads may require and additional Runtime environment installation.)

Vicman's Photo Editor - A terrific feature-disabled photo editor that is comparable to Photoshop. It comes with lots of interesting filters! Also available in a Pro edition.

FX Photo - This is especially good as an image viewer and organizer that also has functions to crop, resize, enhance color and add edges and text to your photos. The collage and slide show features are disabled in the Standard edition.

Active Color - A gem of a program, this does a great job with enhancing color. The Pro edition includes more photo enhancing features and filters.

Serif Photo Plus 5.5 - An older version of Serif's Photo Plus, this program needs online registration.

Pixia - One of my favorites, this Japanese program includes painting tools. I was sad to see the latest upgrade did not include the biorhythms chart and some humorous translations into English!

Jasc Photo Album 5 Beta - One of the newer types of all-purpose programs, Jasc Photo Album 5 not only downloads, organizes and views your photos in folders, it also performs simple photo editing tasks such as crop, color and brightness/contrast enhancement, and adds text, edges, and frames. The Beta download is available for a limited time for those who would like to try commercial quality software that has not yet been released.

Snapfish - Simple cropping, red eye and color correction, this program is also a file organizer and uploader