A Guide to Touching Up Your Digital Photos

A Guide to Touching Up Your Digital Photos One problem I faced when starting out with digital photography was how to touch up my raw digital images. Perhaps an image was slightly dark, perhaps it had to be rotated or cropped. Maybe some dirty spots had to be cleaned out and erased. Digital photos usually require some form of manipulation before final output. So here's a short guide which I've compiled to help you touch up your photos. Step 1: Start Up Your Image Editor The first step, of course, is to fire up your favorite image editing program. For beginners, it's best to get a program like Ulead PhotoImpact. It's a great tool that allows you to achieve professional photo effects using simple, easy-to-follow steps. Ok - with your image editor ready, open the picture you want to edit within the program and save a backup copy. Step 2: Remove Red-Eye If you're taking photos of people, chances are you may have taken a photo with red-eye problems. This is easily removed with image editing software. In Paint Shop Pro, select the Red-Eye Removal tool in the menu and voila, the program does all the work for you. In Ulead PhotoImpact, there's an equivalent tool called Remove Red Eye in the Tool Panel. Step 3: Rotate and Crop If you've taken a photo in a wrong orientation, it's easily corrected with little loss in quality by using a rotate tool. You'll also want to do some cropping of your photo to remove cluttered surroundings that draw attention away from your subject. For example, I find cropping very useful if my subject is occupying only the middle portion of the photograph. Cut away the two sides of the picture and you have a much more professional look. Step 4: Play with Color Don't be afraid to experiment with colors. Image editing programs put a lot of power in your hands. You can make the leaves purple, change the entire photo to black and white, add a sepia effect - almost anything you want. A good photo editing program will have automatic color balance options to adjust color defects in your pictures. Step 5: Blurring Effects Blurring Effects at the side of the photo Sometimes I like to add a blurring effect to my photos. What you can do here is to select areas of the photo which are unimportant and blur them out. This will bring more attention to the main subject of your photo. For example, if I had a picture of a flower and I wanted to play down the details in the leaves in background, I might add a blurring effect to the background. Step 6: Sharpen Up Sharpening the image is the next step in the photo touch up process. Contrary to popular belief, you can't actually sharpen an out of focus image. What I typically do when sharpening an image is to selectively sharpen. That is, I select a part of the image, maybe a person's eyes and sharpen only that area. Leave unimportant areas unsharpened. Step 7: Resize Depending on your needs, you may want to resize your photo. If you're emailing a picture to a friend, you'll want to resize the picture down to a much smaller size. If you're printing the photo on a greeting card, you can scale down the image to the size of a 4x6 print. Step 8: Save Your Work Ok, you're pretty much done. Remember to save your work in the appropriate image format. Use the large TIFF image format if you want to retain all details for subsequent image editing. On the other hand, you can use the JPEG image format if you want to just send the picture via email or upload them to your website. Conclusion Alrighty then! Now you know the secret to touching up and preparing your raw digital photos for output. I'd say that not all the above steps are truly necessary in a given situation. Remember to use your discretion to see which is necessary. Don't be afraid to experiment and learn - practice makes perfect when it comes to touching up your photos.

Display Your Photos In A Digital Photo Frame

Display Your Photos In A Digital Photo Frame Have you ever wanted to display your photos in a digital photo frame? The truth is, digital photo frames are now much more affordable than they used to be. They are a perfect way to share photos with your friends and family. Some of these frames even display videos and play music. In this article, we will look at how we can properly display photos in a digital photo frame. How To Buy A Good Photo Frame There are a few things to take note of before buying a good digital photo frame. First up, you need to take note of the resolution and aspect ratio of the frame - these can differ drastically from model to model and have a huge impact of display quality. Also, you should if the frame supports wireless functionality, which would enable you to transfer photos from your PC to the frame wirelessly. Some digital photo frames also have audio and MP3 support to allow you to pipe in music while viewing your photos. Let's take a look at some digital photo frames now. 1. Kodak W820 The first model we want to look at is the Kodak W820. This photo frame is an 8-inch frame which displays photos very nicely. it supports MP3 music and also has ample 512 MB of internal memory for your photos. The unit can also display both photos and video. 2. Digital Spectrum MF-8115 The Digital Spectrum MF-8115 digital photo frame allows you to display photos at a 800 x 600 resolution. The frame itself is15 inch and comes with 256 MB of internal memory. The unit also allows display of both photos and video. 3. HP df820 The HP df820 is an excellent digital photo frame that plays music and displays video and photos. If you have a PictBridge enabled printer, you can also send off photos to be printed to the printer directly from the frame. The frame is an 8-inch unit and displays photos very nicely. 4. Sony S-Frame DPF-V900 The Sony S-Frame DPF-V900 is a Bluetooth enabled digital photo frame. The nice thing about the frame is that it can connect up to a TV using a HDMI cable. The 9-inch frame allows you to display photos at a decent 800x480 pixel resolution. 5. Westinghouse DPF-0802 The next unit we'll look at is the Westinghouse DPF-0802 digital photo frame. The frame provides a nice MosaicView feature that allows you to display many photos in one frame. There's also a nice photo shuffle feature to display random photos, as well as 128 MB of internal memory. Conclusion Digital photo frames are becoming cheaper and more popular. I hope this article has shown you how to buy a good photo frame and get a sense of the better models out there. A good place to find quality digital photo frames can be found here. So until next time, good luck and happy shopping!

Share Your Digital Photos Using the TV

Share Your Digital Photos Using the TV Have you ever wanted to display your treasured digital photo collection in the living room TV instead of your computer? It certainly makes sense to do this if you’re showing off your pictures to many friends or family members. You wouldn’t want your guests to crowd around that crummy computer screen would you? Well, there are many ways to display photos on TV. Let’s step through the various options in this article. Option 1: Use the Digital Camera The most obvious way to display digital photos on TV is to make use of your digital camera itself. Most, if not all digital cameras these days come with a video-out cable. Simply connect one end of the cable to the video-out of the camera and the other end to the video-in of the TV. Simple as that – play back the pictures on the camera and they will display beautifully on the TV. The drawback of this approach, of course, is that you can only show the photos available on the memory card within the camera. So if you only have a 32MB memory card installed, then you probably show very few pictures. Option 2: Use a Photo Viewing Device Another approach is to use a photo viewing device. One device I which has served me well is the SanDisk Digital Photo Viewer. This neat little device sits on top of your TV set and it accepts popular memory cards like CompactFlash, MultiMedia, Secure Digital, SmartMedia and MemoryStick as input. There is a video-out port to connect the device to the TV. In summary, this approach is similar to using a digital version of a 35mm slide projector, so to speak. The SanDisk Photo Viewer I’ve also noticed some DVD players coming out in the market which accept memory cards as input. One of these is the Sampo DVE-631CF. It’s a reasonably priced DVD player which also allows you to play back MP3s and JPEGs from both CD-R/RW and CompactFlash Type I cards. However, whichever of the above options you choose, you’re still limited by the amount of memory available on your memory card. Hence, if you have a small capacity memory card, you probably can’t show to many pictures at one go. Option 3: Use a DVD Burner The best approach of all, in my opinion, is to convert your digital photos to DVD format. The DVD you create can then be played back in any DVD player to display all your pictures as a slideshow. The chief advantage of this approach over the others is that you can store many, many photos on a 4GB DVD-R. It’s also pretty convenient to send a DVD of pictures (instead of a memory card) to your friends or family members who live faraway. All you need is a DVD burner and some special software. The best software I’ve found for doing this is Ulead CD & DVD PictureShow. With its easy-to-use wizards, this software allows you to convert all your digital photos to DVD in a few simple steps. What’s more, you can add special effects to your photo slideshow, including transitions, music and DVD menus. There’s a full set of tutorials at the Ulead website to guide you if you have doubts. Once you’ve converted them to DVD format, the software burns them into a DVD-R for you. Then simply pop the DVD into any DVD player and play back your picture slideshow. Conclusion This article has shown you three options for displaying photos on your TV set. Displaying photos on the TV certainly makes sense when you have many guests wanting to view your photos. Whichever option you choose is up to you, but I feel that the best approach, as mentioned above, is to convert your photos to DVD format. Good luck and happy sharing!