by Brad Mauer

Created on: April 20, 2009   Last Updated: April 21, 2009

Depending on the digital editing software you are going to use, the tools may vary, but most programs should have the same options with different names. I am familiar with photoshop, so the steps I will be referencing will be from this program. Remember that you can not fix a improperly taken photograph with a computer; you should do your best to get the picture taken correctly in the field and do minor adjustments with the computer.

Open the file that you want to work on; there are different methods you can use to do this. The option I use most is in photoshop;double click the grey background and this will bring up the open file browser. You can also go to file>open this will open up the browser as well. Also you can bring up the folder in windows and right click>open with>Photoshop this Will open photoshop and load the photograph for you. There are other methods available but these few should be sufficient to get you going.

With the file open, go to Image size and adjust the resolution and picture size. A picture to be used on the web, only, can get by with a 72 ppi and just size the photograph to fit whatever requirements you need for your web page. If printing this picture you should use between a 300-360 ppi this will give you a nice crisp looking photograph. When adjusting the ppi to this size will increase the size of the photograph Major, so you will need to decrease the size of your printable image to probably an 8x10, this can still be blown up slightly and no problems shrinking. If you use lower ppi it will lower the quality of the printed image, a 72 ppi will look very blocky and unacceptable. After you're done with this you should save the file with a new name. We need to save frequently so if you run across a mistake you can go back to a previous save and not loose any of your progress.

When editing the image, we want it to the size we are going to use it at. When making adjustments they can become out of wack when resizing. After you have the image to correct size zoom it into 100% so you can see what you are working on and not making major mistakes to the image. When you do adjustments to an image of a smaller zoom you will not see the true adjustnents being made.

The first adjustment we should do is to adjust the colors to look more like what we saw, rather than what the camera saw. We do this by going to layers>new adjustment layer>levels. We use layers because it does not do any changes to the original picture and we can come back

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>