This Article sets out to explain some of the editing tools that are readily available to the amateur photographer in three picture editing suites. The contemporary amateur photographer is almost certainly using a digital camera to capture pictures of family parties, parties and special occasions and needs photo editing software to edit and correct photos that may then be stored digitally, added to online papers or printed off.

So, Simplicity of use is an essential consideration - ease of use of the editing tools and simplicity of the end production of an album that could be reproduced to CD/DVD or uploaded to Photobucket, Flickr or other social media websites.

There Are a number of'open source' picture editing tools available for free, either to download on your computer like Gimp or Photoscape, or even to use directly online, like Picasa and Pixlr. Let's begin with Photoscape. Don't be put off by the fact that Photoscape is free - it's a detailed and powerful photo editing tool. Although the user interface is somewhat clunky - you select your program in the ring of icons - that the software themselves are quite easy to use.

Photoscape is:

A viewer - you can see photos in your records and make a slideshow.

An Editor - you can resize, adjust brightness and colour, correct white balance, adjust the backlight, insert clips, frames, mosaic, insert text, draw pictures, crop photos, remove red-eye and repair using a cloning tool. Plus each of the above can be done in batch editing mode to edit the entire or part of an album quickly.

A printer - sized to your pick - to generate portrait shots or passport/wallet photos.

A combiner - lets you insert photos together to create one, and resize to your liking.

A splitter - pieces photographs into several bits.

An Animated Gif manufacturer - you can add photos or images to produce a final animated'cartoon' fast.

Two ) PhotoPlus (roughly #70 incl. VAT)

Accessible From several outlets, including the high street and internet, PhotoPlus is in the Serif secure of software. It's an extensive software package, capable of producing professional looking results. Contained within it are tools that enable you to:
Are many types of raw image depending on the make of your camera, but they can all be likened to picture negatives - not a image, but containing all of the information required to make an image. Assessing the information is like developing a positive print, adjusting colour grading and white balance along the way.

Write High Dynamic Range (HDR) images - more of this later.

Adjust Not just the image size and colour, color and saturation of photos, but also the brightness, black stage, temperature and more.

Open and edit 64bit images for true high definition results.

Apply filters to create your pictures sepia, black and white, pixillate, mosaic, neon result or just like a poster.

Repair And restore old photographs, eliminate unwanted people and objects from your photographs with the clone and patch tools, remove red-eye, whiten teeth, remove blemishes and smooth skin, or remove the background entirely.

Upload pictures to FaceBook and Flickr in the touch of a button.

Photoplus is easy to use with an intuitive interface, extensive assistance, animated'how tos' and fantastic tutorials.

VAT)

Available From Adobe directly or from resellers like Amazon and Play.com, Adobe Photoshop Elements is a powerful and detailed photo editing package at a very affordable price. The name Photoshop resembles the title Google - it is getting a verb in its own right. Whilst we might'google' some thing in order to find it, if a photograph was changed it has been'photoshoped'.

If we presume that Photoshop can do exactly Any image manipulation you may think about (with some superb filters you probably did not think about ), what sets it apart from the rest of the field?

No. 1 is 'Content aware fill'. This is a load tool Which effectively removes people and objects from the background and fills the emptiness with more background. Obviously, the more simple the background that the more correctly this is sometimes achieved - extracting people from complicated backgrounds is less effective, but a whole lot simpler than spending ages with the copy tool.
'Content aware fill' to fill in the gaps you left when you chose those scenic shots (you can not get them to float precisely!) .

No. 3 is 'Layer Masks'. Layer masks simplify the job of making non-destructive changes to layers so as to merge photos collectively or manually merge photos for High Dynamic Range (HDR) compositions.
Among the very fun styles that may make photographs appear to leap out of a framework, handing Photoshop users the kind of editing abilities that were previously only dreamt of by magazine editors.

No. 5 is easy integration with Facebook. Photoshop Elements may take Before uploading to prevent wasting bandwidth.