Digital Photography Part 2

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This post is the second in a three part series looking at taking, editing and sharing digital photographs. The first part covered taking an image and this post is going to look at editing an image. These subjects are huge and could easily have (and do) a whole blog dedicated to them. So I am just looking at introducing them and what I like about them.

Editing

Being able to upload my photographs onto my computer and then edit them has become very easy to do and the norm. But if I just think back a couple of years none of this was possible, at least not without spending a fortune on the equipment needed to do it. But luckily enough I am living in an age where all this is possible and at a very reasonable price.

Not only that but there is a huge range of software available to choose from to be able to edit my photographs with. From free software that comes with the camera to spending hundreds of pounds on industry standard software like Adobe Photoshop.

Editing is close to my heart because I used to work in an advertising agency and used Adobe Photoshop a lot. I trained at college to become an apple mac operator which included using Adobe Photoshop, Quark and Adobe Illustrator. I love what can be done with these software packages and how easy it is to produce a result with them. Although I can’t afford any of them myself, I use Photoshop Elements for my editing needs.

Why do I want to edit photographs?

When I first heard about editing digital photographs I still used film and I thought why would I want to fiddle about with my photographs and add things or erase things from them. I thought it was, I suppose cheating. I didn’t like the idea of ‘faking a photograph’. But there is a lot more to editing images than just cutting out and sticking somebody’s head onto another body!

But once I took the time to look at editing closely and then have a go myself, I realised it is a great tool for photographers. For instance red eye is no longer a problem, and that’s great especially when it comes to taking snapshot pictures of kids. It can be bad enough just trying to capture them, never mind worrying about red eye!

Editing photographs gives me huge potential for what I can do with a photograph and I realised that when I worked at the advertising agency. Whether it’s removing red eye from a snapshot or producing photographs for a full colour brochure, it can be done and it’s really good fun to just have a play around to see what I can create, with the software available these days it’s practically the sky is the limit for what I could do. I now love what editing photographs, and the software I use can produce.

Cropping a photograph can really change the emphasis, or allow me to zoom in on a feature or just get rid of that unwanted object that I couldn’t avoid.

Here’s a photograph I was just messing around with showing the before and after shots, it gives the image a focal point that wasn’t obvious in the first image.

Framing the photograph and adding a caption really makes it stand out, and is great for sharing holiday snaps as well as reminding me where, when or what they were. Or it could even be enlarged for a print.

This is only a sample of what can be achieved with editing photographs, and as I said earlier a whole blog could be devoted to it.

This is my introduction to editing and I am sure I will talk about it again in the future because I enjoy it so much!

Mandy

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