Photo Editing

Now I can move the photo onto my computer where I can crop and resize it, as well as colour correct the image to get rid of the yellowness.

I use Adobe Photoshop to do my photo editing, though there are lots of other programs which will do the same thing without being so complex, and cameras often come supplied with a piece of editing software.  If all else fails, any Microsoft Office program has limited editing features, and can crop and resize images, as well as change the brightness and contrast.

*STOP PRESS!*

Since writing this article, Adobe have launched some new online photo-editing software called Photoshop Express which has a lot of automated filters to touch up pics.  I've not used it, but it looks quite good and very straightforward.

The first step is to crop your image to the right proportion.  Cropping is simply removing the sections of an image you don't want so instead of an image of a Spellsinger and 18" of white paper, I just get the Spellsinger!

The next step is to adjust of the photo so it looks as close as possible in appearance on screen to how you see the real thing in front of you.  Image editing programs like Photoshop have automatic filters which help you do all of this.  The simplest way is to manually adjust the brightness and contrast of the image until you like the result.  Contrast is simply a measure of the difference between the light and dark parts, so an image with a high contrast has really black shadows and really bright highlights, and one with a low contrast is grey and flat.

The final step of the process is to resize your image to a sensible size.   Digital images have two attributes which determine their dimensions - size and resolution.  Size is physically how many pixels there are in the picture, like the pieces of a jigsaw, and resolution is how small those pixels are in reality.  Resolution is measured in ‘dots per inch' or dpi, which shows how many of the photo's pixels make up one inch when printed on paper.

When viewing a picture on screen, only the size of the image determines how large the image will appear, resolution only comes in to play if you actually want to print your image out.  For example, the two pictures below both look identical on screen, as they are both 250 pixels wide.  However, if I printed them out, the 72dpi image would be about 9cm wide, while the 300dpi version would be a tiny 2.5cm wide due to its higher resolution.

Its really up to you what size picture you want to show, and depends how big your monitor is.  Mine displays 1200 pixels across, so a 400 pixel wide image is about a third of the full width of the monitor, which is fine for a man-sized mini, unless it has lots of detail.