Remember when you would snap a picture with your camera and pray that the shot turned out?
These days the evolution of digital photography has made it virtually impossible to take a bad picture.
Gone are the days when you’d take a roll of film into a developer and hope for the best. Back then if your photos were washed out, blurry or framed incorrectly, you just dealt with it and tried to improve your picture-taking skills to avoid future mistakes.
Not any more.
Today, even the worst photo can be edited to look as if it were professionally shot. Photo editing options are practically limitless. What’s more, photo editing software is accessible to the masses, so now any photographer with a digital camera and computer can manipulate his photo to look exactly how he wants it to.
If you are contemplating jumping on the photo editing bandwagon, you might want to familiarize yourself with the following terms:
Color balance: This refers to the color temperature of your photo. Using the warm color balance setting can enhance warmer colors, such as red and yellow. Likewise, you can edit colder color tones like blue and green with the cooler color balance setting.
Contrast: If you want to fix the middle color tones of your photo, then employ the contrast tool. A high contrast setting will emphasize the blacks and whites in your photo, so the colors are polarized. A low contrast setting will make the image appear gray.
Brightness/Density: Use this tool in conjunction with the contrast setting. It will make a photo lighter or darker.
Saturation: This tool addresses the intensity of the colors in your photo. Increase the saturation to get more vivid colors and decrease it to get more muted or subtle colors in your photo.
There are dozens of other editing settings, but these are the most basic. Other popular editing options include converting a photo to black and white or sepia, cropping and red-eye removal.
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