Retouching your Digital Photos
We will not go into too many details in this section as there are a lot of tutorials and photo retouching software available on the market.
One of the advantages of digital photography is being able to easily fix or retouch the photos before printing, displaying or publishing them. There are a variety of software packages that will allow you to do this - some will allow simple touch ups, while more complex packages offer more diverse editing flexibility and more professional results. Most software packages offer inline help features and tutorials to guide you through these techniques.
There are as well a lot of websites offering tips and tricks. Only practice will allow you to get better and faster at retouching digital photos.
The best way to avoid spending too much time retouching your photos is to try to take the “original” as close to perfection as possible directly with the camera.
Before you proceed with retouching, make sure you have copied and saved the original files. Most professionals use an external hard drive to store and back up their files before AND after they are retouched. I usually have 2 copies of each photo I take: the original and the retouched one.
External hard drive prices are becoming very inexpensive and are worth the investment to protect your priceless files from a computer crash or an operator error.
Photo Post-processing
The most common retouching tasks are:
- Correcting the exposure to make a photo look brighter or darker.
- Changing the brightness of some or all colors to make a photo more vivid.
- Eliminating red-eye
- Removing an unwanted item like a car or a person from a photo.
Horizon Adjustment
This is one of the corrections that is usually overseen: making sure that your horizon is straight. It is easy to rotate the photo so that the horizon or objects captured appear straight. Because of the perspective of the photo, it may not be possible to make everything level, so you should use the horizon as your ruler, or take a dominant object in the scene, like a person or building, and use that as a guide.
Photo Cropping
Cropping can be another powerful editing tool especially with newer cameras that have greater resolution. Cropping trims off unwanted parts of the photo leaving you with the parts you want to keep. This can have a significant effect on the photo, since you can change the balance, composition and drama of a photo, for example, in a photo where a subject was centered, you can crop off more on one side to align objects with the rule of thirds, or remove portions of the background, like a building, tree or stray person. You can also crop a photo to change it from landscape to portrait, leading to a more interesting picture than the one you originally took.