Picture Editing Guide
First ask yourself what you want to do with all your images, do you just want to tidy up your holiday photos or do you want to significantly alter and edit them?
The industry standard is Photoshop and it’s a truly amazing package; you can import really large images and change not just the scale and size, but colours, lighting, shadows, brightness, and sharpness. You can layer different images on top of an original, use clone tool to copy an area and repeat it around the image, the list is endless!
From photographers, film and video pros, graphic and web designers, architects, engineers and medical professionals – it’s used by people who need to process and edit a lot of images with complex modifications.
You can also buy Photoshop with Lightroom, which allows you to manage large numbers of photographs.
The only problem with Photoshop is the hole it blows in your budget; CS4 Extended, the top package, is around £950.
There is free-source software out there, but it obviously lacks a lot of Photoshop features.
GIMP (GNU image manipulation program) features most of the basics, including crop, blur and re-sizing and scaling tools. Plus the name is always good for a few laughs.
One of the great things about GIMP is its small footprint, and consequently it will run on systems as old as Windows 2000.
The answer to that question is a website in itself and we haven’t got the space to explain here, but Adobe offers great customer support and there are video tutorials on the website to teach you all sorts of new techniques.
Even better, because it’s the industry standard there are scores of sites offering hints, tips and advice from people who use it every day.
Photoshop Elements is designed for the amateur user and offers some of the great features of the full package at a fraction of the price. It features red-eye reduction, tools to lighten poorly lit photos, crop and edit functions, and starts at around £75.
Picnik works totally online, gives you crop, resize and rotate, fonts and lighting tools. It will also work with the sites where you store photos, like Facebook or photobucket. There’s a premium upgrade for $24.95 a month.
Picasa, from Google, allows you to remove red eye, crop and resize photos. Its real function is as a social tool allowing you to share photos online with friends and family.
When you save your painstakingly drawn pictures, retouched photos or new web designs, you’ll want save it in a file format that other people, without your software, can open.
.gif – A GIF compresses the image and is often used on web pages for simple graphics. It has a limited colour palette.
.jpg – A JPEG compresses an image resulting in some loss of quality. It’s the web standard.
.tiff – A TIFF does not compress the image and is best for photos and printing.
.png – A PNG does not compress the image, and is best for images that require further editing.
Requirements
- Photoshop – Windows XP/Vista or Mac OS X v10.4.11, minimum 512 Mb RAM, 1Gb hard disk space/ 2Gb for Macs
- Picasa – Windows XP/Vista or Linux, 256 Mb RAM, 100 Mb hard disk space
- Picnik – broadband connection.
- GIMP – Supports Windows 2000 or higher. Minimum 128 Mb RAM
Images by swanksalot, bruchez
Written by Tom Mowlam
Tom is a young technology journalist based in London. Though a diehard Windows user, if pressed he will admit to quite liking Apple products – he just doesn’t get on with touchscreens.
Thu, Dec 10, 2009