A Digital Photograph Touch-Up Tutorial

Posted on August 21, 2008
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by David Peters

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.

Step 2: Remove Red-Eye Almost everyone has experienced the red-eye effect when taking pictures of people. This is an easy corrected problem with image editing software. A Red-Eye Removal tool can be found in the menu of Paint Shop Pro that does all of the work for you. Ulead Photo Impact offers the same feature with its Remove Red Eye option in the Tool Panel.

Step 3: Rotate and Crop If you want to change the angle of your photograph, you can do this with little loss in quality by using the rotate tool. You may also need to crop your photo to remove cluttered or unnecessary background area that might take focus away from the subject of the photo. Doing this will create 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 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 The next step in touching up a photo would be to sharpen as needed. While you cannot truly sharpen an out of focus image you can improve on it by selectively sharpening focal points. Sharpen a person’s eyes for example and leave the rest of the image unsharpened.

Step 7: Resize You may need to resize your photo to suit your need. To e-mail your photo, resize to a smaller dimension. To print on a greeting card, you will want to resize your image to a 4×6 size.

Step 8: Save Your Work We’re almost finished. Now all you have to do is save your work in the suitable image format. If you want to save all of the details for future editing, save in the TIFF format. If you want to send the picture by e-mail or upload to a web site, choose the JPEG format for saving the image.

Conclusion That’s all there is to it! Now you have the basics for touching up and preparing your raw digital photos for output. While all of the above steps might not fit every photo situation, they are among the most common your might need. Experiment and practice with the different tools and options to make the most out of all of your digital images.

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