Photo editing software for beginners => http://luepalankda.nnmcloud.ru/d?s=YToyOntzOjc6InJlZmVyZXIiO3M6MjE6Imh0dHA6Ly9iaXRiaW4uaXQyX2RsLyI7czozOiJrZXkiO3M6MzY6IlBob3RvIGVkaXRpbmcgc29mdHdhcmUgZm9yIGJlZ2lubmVycyI7fQ== Image manipulation is in the realm of Adobe Photoshop. Another great package from the clever bods at Adobe is Adobe Lightroom. Download it now for: Three good alternatives Paint. Whether you are a hobbyist or a professional, you need to edit your photos to balance hues, remove blemishes, improve saturation, create special effects, and more. Bottom Line: Adobe continues to improve the world's leading photo editing software. Or you can also repair old photos, erase wrinkles and skin blemishes, digital facial retouching and more. Batch processing is also enabled so that multiple photos can be edited with ease and the best part is that it supports about 250 fonts for easy editing. Of course, some users with less-intensive needs can get all the Photoshop-type features they need from other products in this roundup, such as Corel PaintShop Pro. It has functionalities that enable you to remove scratches, creases, marks, and other defects. Beginners can easily learn the basic photo editing skills with this interactive software platform that possess wide range of editing tools. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of web services for a general audience. With years of experience and lots of professional work under his belt, taking and editing both stills and video, he knows his stuff… Cormac is the gapyear. Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and other Adobe applications are available as a bundle through. Photo Editing for Beginners - Enthusiasts want to do more than just import, organize and render their photos: They want to do fun stuff, too! Written by: Cormac Scanlan Photo editing and processing is almost as old as photography itself. Since the birth of the photo, photographers have always strived to improve their photos by developing them at home, tinting, toning, and cropping their pictures to make a good photo great. In the days when all photography was shot on film, the option to edit and process photos was pretty much limited to professionals and enthusiasts with a lot of time and patience. These days however, the development of the digital camera has meant that you no longer need your own darkroom to improve your photos. Well maybe not, but there are literally hundreds of packages on the market. Simply choosing a software package to start out with can be a task in itself. Free image editing software First up are the free software packages. Free stuff means more money to spent elsewhere, so for a lot of people this might be the preferred option. Below are the most commonly used free image editing packages: Picasa Picasa is a downloadable image organiser from Google which also features some basic photo editing options. There are a variety of quick fix options such as contrast and colour adjustments, as well as the ability to remove red eye and crop your images. Significantly, it also offers the ability to adjust the shadows and highlights of an image, a feature that a number of the cheaper paid packages lack. PhotoPlus PhotoPlus for example, offers many of the creative tools you would usually expect to find on a piece of professional editing software such as layer effects, and clone, smudge and erase tools. It can even open Photoshop documents and features support for most Photoshop plug-ins. Double-check the box if you still have it, there might be some software on a disc in there that already does what you want. There are literally hundreds of alternatives ranging from the sublime to the practically useless. As with most things, as a rule of thumb you are best sticking to the well known ones. Perhaps the most popular entry level editing photo editing software for beginners is Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is a consumer version of Adobe Photo editing software for beginners, costing a fraction of photo editing software for beginners price. Another great package from the clever bods at Adobe is Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom is about twice the price of Photoshop Elements and is a nice bridge between it and the full version of Photoshop. Like Photoshop Elements, Lightroom does not feature any of the graphic design features of Photoshop, but it is an excellent tool for processing and managing your photos, from the point where they leave your camera to the time you output them to web or print. The workflows are so well honed to photo editing that many professional photographers with access to both Photoshop and Lightroom, favour the latter. The trial is completely free and will give you a month to find out which works best for you. If you are after a good alternative to the Adobe packages, you could look at Corel Paint Shop Pro. It therefore contains all of the major functions of Photoshop, but without the sharp learning curve. Other popular entry level packages include Microsoft Digital Image Suite and Ulead PhotoImpact. Both are good for basic editing but fall short of Elements, Lightroom and Paint Shop Pro for ease of use and sheer number of options. Both programs are pretty similar in terms of features and functions, but work in a slightly different way. Photoshop features file support for other Adobe programs such as Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects, making it ideal for graphic designers and video artists, as well photographers. It also comes packaged with Adobe ImageReady which is a great piece of kit for creating gif animations and producing web graphics. It is however laid out similarly to Macromedia Flash and supports some use of vector graphics; so anyone with any experience of using Flash should feel right at home with it. Adobe bought out Macromedia a few years ago, so Adobe Photo editing software for beginners as it is now called now comes with the Adobe Creative Suite, meaning if you want to try Photoshop or Fireworks and have the money for Creative Suite, you no longer need to make the choice. For the more serious photographers amongst you who are considering forking out for full Photoshop though, I would again recommend doing a 30 day free trial first. I would also suggest a trial of Adobe Lightroom so you can compare the two packages as you may find it covers all of your photo editing needs, in a more user friendly way, for a fraction of the cost. Software bought… where do I start. Think of your editing software as a way of correcting or perfecting whatever you shot on the camera. When you start out, play with these. Get it out of your system. This sort of experimentation will actually teach you a lot about the way the software works, but if you want to be respected as a photographer your photos should look like photos. The most basic alterations are simple colour adjustments. Most image packages have quick fixes for these, which are meant to make the colour look more authentic. Sometimes a quick and simple adjustment of the brightness and contrast is enough to turn a dull underexposed snapshot into a nice high impact photograph. Hue allows you to change the colour of an image and saturation allows you to make an image more colourful. Levels and curves are very delicate, and quite complex. Levels allow you to adjust the amount of the 3 primary colours individually, and curves go one step further by allowing you to adjust the shadows and highlights too. They allow you to brighten the dark regions of an image, and darken the bright bits. Once again this is a delicate process, overdoing it can ruin an image, so be sure to combine it with a brightness and contrast adjustment rather than trying to correct everything using shadows and highlights. Cropping The ability to crop images can be a really useful tool for improving your composition. Sometimes cropping an image by as little as 5% can make a world of photo editing software for beginners, at other times cropping out over half of a photo can turn an insignificant area of a large image into a stunning new shot. Rotating the image to line up the vertical and horizontal lines with the edges of the image will also help make your image more striking. The image on the right does not look natural as very few digital cameras would be able to shoot an image that is as long and thin as this one. Toning and desaturating Most editing packages will give you the options to do all sorts of crazy things to your images, most of which you will probably want to ignore, but there are a few useful ones. The first of these is the option to desaturate: meaning to turn a colour image into black and white. There are several ways to do this. Choosing what to make black and white and what to make colour is entirely down to you, but as a general rule think about textures and shapes when shooting for black and white. Black and white images accentuate textures as they attract your eye more when there is no colour, and strong geometric shapes often look far bolder in black and white than they do in colour. Toning allows you to add a colour to a black and white or sometimes a colour image. Check the help files to find out how to tone image using your software. Tip: For more striking results, once you are comfortable with desaturating, look into converting to black and white through coloured filters, this will allow you to accentuate different parts of the image depending on the coloured filter used. There are loads of things that good software packages can do if you take the time to learn them properly. The trick is to learn the basics first; and more importantly, to learn when and if to use them. Carefully combining the various colour and contrast adjustments is a skill in itself. Learn from your editing too, and think about it when you shoot photos. Most of all have fun and experiment. Editing and processing is a skill in itself. Almost every single photo ever shot can be perfected and improved in some way. This combination will be vital to developing your own style, and making your images stand out in a sea of bland, samey travel photos… About the author: Cormac Scanlan Author Cormac Scanlan is our resident photographer and Photoshop junkie. With years of experience and lots of professional work under his belt, taking and editing both stills and video, he knows his stuff… Cormac is the gapyear. He has worked at gapyear. For more photography by Cormac Scanlan, visit.