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Photo editing has come a long way since the darkroom.  Actions that used to take hours of painstaking work can now be done or, more importantly, undone at the click of a mouse.  So where do you get started in learning how to navigate the world of digital photo editing?  We’ve created this quick guide to help you start in the right direction.

Photo Editing Software
There are many, many pieces of software dedicated to photo editing on the market.  There is a huge range in price and quality when it comes to digital photo editing software. Ultimately, you have to decide how much editing you want to do with your pictures and how much you want to spend.  In this article, we won’t discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each photo editor, but know there is a lot of options to choose from depending upon what you want.  If you’re looking for a free photo editor you can’t beat Paint.net or The Gimp, or if you’d like to buy a professional photo editor you simply can’t beat the power of Adobe Photoshop.

Basic Functions of Photo Editing Software
Although photo editing software can be very complex and allow for endless creativity, here are a few basic things that you’ll want to know right away.

• Cropping: Cropping is when you take parts of a photo you don’t need, then get rid of them by redrawing the frame.  Anything inside the frame will be kept, anything outside will be trashed.  One important thing to remember about cropping is that it changes the final dimensions of your photographs, so if you’re planning on printing or display them in wood picture frames them make sure you crop with the same aspect ratio (width to height).
• Image Contrast: Contrast impacts how much the colors or tones stand out from one another.  Add contrast and you’ll see your darks get darker and your lights get lighter, remove contrast and eventually everything will cloud into a gray fog.  Higher contrasts can make for interesting imagery, but will also make the grain of your photos stand out more.
• Brightness: Brightness applies to the overall level of the entire image.  If you’ve taken a picture that turned out too dark, turning up the brightness may help some of the details stand out. If you slowly increase the contrast and brightness together, you may be able to save an otherwise un-usable picture.
• Photo Saturation: Saturation refers to the intensity and depth of the colors in your picture.  If you remove the saturation from a color picture, the photo will change to black and white.  By turning up the saturation, the colors in your picture will quickly look excessively bright and unnatural.
• The Hue: The hue changes the tone of your picture.  Adjust the hue and your entire image will shift from a blue or green tint to red, purple, or any other color.  Although it takes a little time to get used to, changing the hue can make a big improvement to images taken under fluorescent light.
• Transform: Though presented differently in each software suite, they all have some way for you to flip, rotate, or resize your images.  Hopefully you won’t have to make too many adjustments of this nature, but should an image turn out slightly crooked it’s good to know you have alternatives.

Regardless of which photo editing software you use, you should be able to adjust all of the elements mentioned above so you can get your photos exactly how you want them.  One way to add depth and bring out the picture’s color is to decrease the saturation amount while increasing the contrast.  Otherwise, do your best not to rely on editing and try to get all of the work done in the camera.  Editing is a tool, but it’s always better if you start with the best possible photograph and make it better, as opposed to trying to salvage an awful shot.

For the digital photography enthusiast, becoming well acquainted with photo editing is one of the digital photography basics that can make a world of difference in how well a photograph turns out.

Image editing software to a digital photographer is what the dark room is to a film photographer. The difference is that photo editing software makes photo editing something that anyone can do without setting up a darkroom.

Plus, with photo editing software you can do both standard image editing, such as cropping and adjusting color, and with the right software, you can also try your hand at photo manipulation.

Image editing refers to all changes that are made to a photograph. Photo manipulation is what photographers sometimes refer to as “trick photography” where you can do things like changing backgrounds and other things. (For some fun examples of photo manipulation, look up the “National Geographic Photo Foolery” page online.)

Before you choose a photo editor, you first want to understand the type of image editing you want to do. In this article, we will highlight the most popular types of photo editing software so you can understand the differences between each of them.

Picasa: Google’s free photo editor. If you are just getting into the very basics of digital photography, this will serve you well for a while. It’s really intended to be more of a photo manager and online photo album both very handy applications, but Picasa also handles the most basic editing. Picasa offers basic editing functions like retouching where you can remove scratches or blemishes. Like many photo editors it has red eye remover. It also has fun applications like creating screensavers with your photos and integration with Google Earth.

If you’re ready to advance from digital photography basics and do more with your images, consider one of the other photo editors.

Adobe Photoshop Elements: The market leader in photo editing and manipulation, it’s more user-friendly and less costly (approximately $90) than its big brother, Photoshop CS4. It’s great for the photography enthusiast and there is even a free trial version.

Adobe Photoshop CS4: This has everything a professional photographer or graphic artist needs. It sells for approximately $700 on their site, but it’s offered for half that by some vendors and may offer a free trial version.

Paint Shop Pro: This is a close competitor to Photoshop Elements and also runs about $90. They also offer a 30 day free trial.

The GIMP: For such a powerful program the name certainly doesn’t fit it but instead is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. This photo editor is open source (aka freeware) and continues to improve and has a good community of users if you need help. It is available for Unix/Linux platforms, as well as Windows (NT4/2000/XP/Vista) and Mac operating systems (OS X). It doesn’t have everything you get with Adobe Photoshop CS4, but it does have more than Paint Shop Pro or Elements and is used by some professionals.

No matter what photo editor you have, read through the guide or help sections so you understand what you can do with it.

It takes time to learn but you will be impressed with what you can do with your images.

For example, here are a just a few of the things you can accomplish (the top 5 even with just Picasa):

• Crop
• Resize
• Lighten or darken shadows, highlights, and midtones
• Correct Colors
• Remove blemishes, a stray branch, a logo, or anything else you don’t want in the picture
• Blur Backgrounds (Photoshop Elements, Paintshop Pro and The GIMP all offer background-blurring applications. Picasa doesn’t.)

You can also create all sorts of special effects with a photo editor. For example you can turn your photo into an impressionistic painting. You can also convert a color picture into a black and white image to better capture the tones and highlights.
Or you can choose sepia for a vintage look.

And with photo editing software, you can also more easily create pictures that can go in any size picture frame whether it’s a small picture frame or a 4×6 picture frame or larger.

Even if you don’t care about special effects, learning the basics of even the most basic photo editor will allow you to fix mistakes made in photographing. Just by cropping your picture can make a big difference in how your photograph turns out. That is why photo editing is an important part of learning the digital photography basics and why it’s important that you learn it. Before you know it, you will be editing and producing quality images perfect for displaying in a metal picture frame.