FUN WITH PHOTOS: EDITING

Increased saturation and contrast

Photography is a big part of my life. Maybe it's my addiction! I have over 12,000 photos on Flickr (not all them are good - but I use it as a backup, in case anything ever happened to my computer.) I started to get interested in photography years ago when I worked in one hour photo labs in New Zealand. My job was to print photos, check them, and fix them if they were too dark or light, or a strange color. Perhaps because of that, I have always been interested in editing photos.

I love how digital cameras and computers have made editing easier for ordinary, non-technical people. For years and years I took all my photos on my camera's automatic settings, because I wasn't much interested in cameras... it was the picture I was interested in... the view, or the face, or the moment. Although I have learned a bit more about how my camera works over the last couple of years (enough to know I should buy a better one) I still spend more time editing photos and doing other stuff with them, than I spend taking them. And while you can't make a bad photo into a good one, many photos can be improved with a little editing.

Increased saturation & color correction

Sometimes people ask me what I use for editing. I use several different programs and none of them are Photoshop. I do have an old-ish copy of Photoshop, but it's all in Japanese, most of which I can't read. To start with I use Picasa to adjust light and dark contrast, sometimes increase the saturation (I like rich color), and occasionally crop my images. I also use Picasa to remove any small marks. (It's quite good for getting rid of wrinkles!)

Wrinkles & dark circles under eyes removed

Picasa is also very convenient for cropping images, but if the image needs straightening, I do it in Paint.net because if you use the straightening feature in Picasa the image loses some of its sharpness.

Straightened

Both Picasa and Paint.net are free to download.