Many people have trouble knowing how or whether or not in the first place to edit their digital photos. Most photographs just don't turn out the way you imagined; they might be too dark, or too red, or too big. Depending on what you need in a digital photo-editing program, you may want to get a more simple or a slightly more advanced software. For example, if all you're planning on doing is correcting a few minor details in a picture, you want to go as simple as possible. If you're planning on adding things to pictures or taking them out, or changing the color of objects, you will want a more advanced program.
There are many pictures that you've probably taken that would've looked great... except for the red-eye. Just about every graphics program has a red-eye removal, so that no matter what level your program is you'll be able to remove the red-eye. However, in order to prevent it in the first place, it helps to know what causes it. Red-eye is caused by the flash reflecting to the back of the eyes all the way to the retina, and the red comes from the blood vessels in the eye. Therefore, if you flash a light in the eyes of your subject, this will cause the pupil to contract, and then there won't be any red-eye.
Cropping is a good tool to use when you have a picture that has too much going on, or perhaps too little. In the former, you would want to cut the image down to just the subject of your picture, essentially eliminating all the distracting surrounding objects. In the latter, you would do the same thing, in order for your subject not to look too solitary. Once you begin cropping, you'll find there are many different creative ways to crop your pictures; every picture is different, and you'll find different ways to improve your pictures with cropping.
Experimenting with colors can be a great way to create a whole new picture from something plain. There are so many ways to edit colors, and playing around with them can help you discover different techniques. You can make a photograph look aged with sepia, or you can change a color photograph to black and white. Just about all photo-editing programs have color-balance options. All you have to do is experiment with them to find results you like.
When you upload your pictures from your digital camera to your computer, most of them will probably be a little blurry. Probably it won't be enough to make you want to change it, but if it's not, there's always the UnSharp Mask that you can use to sharpen the image. Most cameras don't apply any kind of sharpening filter to pictures they take, and so they won't always look as crisp as you might want. Most likely if you have a basic editing program you will be able to sharpen your pictures successfully, and you can sharpen them as much or as little as you want.
When you email pictures to friends, you will notice it usually takes a very long time to attach the files. This is because the size of the picture is probably too large to process well. In order to reduce the size of the file, you must reduce the size of the picture. Your editing program will most likely have an option that allows you to change the dimensions of the images, which will change the size. Usually you would use this option to make images smaller, not larger, as the quality would be greatly reduced.
Saving your pictures in the appropriate format is very important to ensure the best quality. If you are planning to continue to work with a certain picture, save it as a TIFF image, as it will retain all the detail of the picture. However, if you want a compressed image and you are done working with it, you can save it as a JPEG. Although a JPEG is a lossy file format, it does not lose enough data to be noticeably visible, and it is a good compressing format. This means it will make the size of the file smaller. As long as you don't keep opening, editing, and saving a JPEG image, you won't get too much degradation of the photo.
