Basic photography editing

Once you have taken your photographs you may want to make some changes in the contrast, colors, or size prior to printing or having them printed. Most, if not all digital cameras come with a basic picture editing program. Many computers will also have a version of a photography editing program. My computer has a program installed that is called Photo Gallery. It is capable of basic photo editing including “auto adjust”, cropping, red eye removal, retouch, noise reduction, straighten, color, exposure and fine tuning. Auto adjust does just that, determines what is the basic center-line of all available adjustments and adjusts your photograph to that level. In essence it will straighten the picture so it is evenly vertically distributed in the frame. It will set the brightness, contrast and saturation to the center balance point and run a sharpening mask that will somewhat sharpen the focus on the picture. The cropping feature allows you to “crop” or remove some areas of the picture that are unneeded for the composition of the picture. The red eye removal tool will darken the pupil of the eye or eyes that turned red due to the use of flash photography. Everything I have listed here are just basic edits that are available to use on your digital photographs if you need or desire to do so. Many of these programs are considered to be very minimal and for the average photographer who is not doing fine art photography or needing a high caliber editing program.

For those times when you want or need a more robust photo editing program typing “photo editing software” into your web browser's search box will give you many different brands and sources of software for photo editing. From my personal research, some version of Adobe Photo-shop is the best known and recommended brand of photo editing software. I have no way to tell if that is true or not, because I have never tried that software. From what I have been told, it is designed to be very user friendly. From my wallet's perspective it is prohibitively expensive. Of course, frequently enough, from my wallet's perspective, McDonald's is prohibitively expensive. If you would like to find out more about Adobe and Photo-shop check out this link http://www.photoshop.com/products/photoshop. 
  If you type “free photo editing software” into your internet web browser search box you will probably find that in the number one position, just below the top three paid advertisement slots is GIMP.

I have been using GIMP for several years now and have a basic familiarity with the photo editing portion of it. Not having used Adobe or any of the other photo editing programs out there, I can not evaluate them against GIMP. I can tell you from my experience that GIMP is a very solid program, that I like immensely. It does require a large amount of study and practice to grasp the basic concepts of advanced photo editing using it. I use it for editing my photographs in more detail than is possible with basic photo editing programs, but it has much more to offer than I have tried yet. From what I am able to grasp and THINK I UNDERSTAND, it is a digital art shop for any digital artist. The absolute best thing about it as far as I am concerned is that it is an open source digital download that is currently offered for free. If you want more information or to access the free download please visit: http://www.gimp.org/ to download and start using it. I have never been disappointed by what this program can do. I have been disappointed in my ability to comprehend the how and why's of the program at first. Surprisingly enough, a helpful place to find tutorials about GIMP is actually https://www.youtube.com/. Simply type GIMP tutorial into the search box of youtube and a large number of GIMP tutorials pop up. In fact many if not all of my photographs at http://chris-mercer.artistwebsites.com/ have been touched up using GIMP. I love and highly recommend that you at least try it.