What can be better than capturing the best moments of our lives and being able to relive them again and again? When you take digital photos, you have the ability to turn them into meaningful works of art - masterpieces that you can print, publish to a blog online, and so much more.
So photo-editing software - how does it work? A digital photo is made up of pixels, which fit together in a grid-like pattern (Figure A), and hold a portion of your photo's color information. With image-editing software, you can modify these pixels by changing their color, the lighting, or their appearance entirely! You can make a photo look like a watercolor (Figure B), a charcoal drawing, stained glass, or just crop it to close in on a particular portion of the image. You are limited only in what you can imagine.
Rewriting the rules on photography. With photo-editing software you can take a photo and alter a single aspect of it - for instance, you can make blue eyes green, make teeth whiter, or color just one item in a black-and-white photograph, making that item really pop! Most photo-editing programs available today have a built-in, one-click tool - often referred to as a "lasso" or "marquee tool" - to capture just a single aspect of your photo without touching the rest.
You can even lasso something, like a stranger who wasn't meant to be captured, out of a photograph. After you remove the person, you can "clone" the surrounding background and fill the empty space. Or you can clone the surrounding area and just color right over the top of the person with sky, ground, water, and so on. It's like nothing to see here!
Or maybe you think that some famous actor or actress should be in the photo with you, in this case, you could lasso them from another photograph into yours. And this is all because of that wonderful grid of movable, malleable pixels!
I want my picture smaller, bigger, cropped! If you have a high-resolution photo that you want to e-mail your friend, you'll want to send something smaller than 3 MB so you don't receive a very angry "you crashed my email!" message. With "image scaling" you can change the resolution of a picture to reduce its file size and visa-versa. When you print a photo, you want the highest resolution possible. However, if you are e-mailing your photos or posting them to the Web, you can go low resolution. Photo-editing software allows you to save your photo with a click of a mouse, resizing your photo to low, medium, or high-resolution in an instant. An instant!
To crop a photo, it's often as easy as dragging your mouse over the rectangular area you want to keep, and deleting the rest. This is probably one of the simplest ways to get up close and personal on the best parts of a photo. What's great is that it screams, "I am a great photographer who knows how to capture the best shot." Genius! Again, this is a common feature in most photo-editing software.
Shedding some light on the situation. Who hasn't taken a picture and thought, "oh, that's way too dark" or "the sunlight shining through that window makes everyone look overly pasty"? The great thing about photo editing is that - again - with a click of the mouse, you can adjust the lighting in your photo to be lighter, darker, bluer, whatever! As the photo master, you wield the magical photo-editing software to do your bidding.
Software - making art happen with a click. Thanks to digital cameras taking the world by photographic storm, we now have an amazing amount of new software programs out there to help us flex our artistic muscle. Not only are they intuitive, but in a lot of cases they’re free! Here are some great resources so you can get started today! As in, today! As in, now! Seize the moment!
Get started with FREE photo-editing software:
Microsoft Photo Story* 3 for Windows* >>
Adobe Photoshop* Album Starter Edition >>
A Closer Look at Online Photo Editors >>
Tips and tricks:
How to Bring Your Photos to Life >>
Four Essential Photo Editing Tricks >>
Print, Save & Organize Your Digital Photos >>
Top 3 Ways to Share Photos Online >>
Fun with photos:
Put Together a Digital Photo Slideshow >>
Creating a Digital Family Album >>
Sending Digital Photos by E-mail >>
Your digital camera:
Demystifying Digital Camera Resolution >>
Capturing a Great Digital Picture >>
Avoiding Red Eye in Digital Photography >>
Downloading Images from Your Digital Camera >>
 Figure A: Up-close and personal with pixels |  Figure B: Image before (top) and after modifying (bottom) |
