photo editing

Photo Editing

Written by- Nolan Williamson

Programs

There are a ton of programs for photo editing out there, each with prices ranging from $0 to $10 to $700 and on.

This guide is designed for high school students, so all of the programs that are discussed here are free!

Picasa®One of the best programs available for

organizing, simple editing, and viewing is Picasa®, which is made by Google.

Picasa®

Other than a great organizational tool, Picasa® can be used to fix photos with improper exposure, do simple editing, and add some effects to your photos. The two slides show a before and after of a photo edited in this program.

The story: I was outside playing basketball when I saw some interesting light on a tree behind the goal. I got my camera, took the picture and continued to play basketball until the light was gone. When I got inside and uploaded the photos, I found that the photos were composed just fine, but the exposure was off by several stops of light! Picasa® came to the rescue and saved my photos with just a few clicks!

Before

After

Picasa®

Just by clicking the “I’m Feeling lucky” button in the editing menu, Picasa® changed the lighting, colors, and saturation in less than a second! There are also manual options for editing light, saturation, tint, and tons of other features. There is also a built in version of “picnic”, a popular, basic, user friendly online editing and manipulation tool.

You can download this program by clicking on one of these links

Windows (PC)- http://picasa.google.com/intl/en/Mac- http://picasa.google.com/intl/en/mac/Linux- http://picasa.google.com/intl/en/linux/

Gimp

Gimp is a program modeled after Adobe® Photoshop, and is designed for heavy photo editing, manipulation, and effects. This program is not as user friendly as Picasa, but it gets a lot more work done, has thousands more features, and although it is a bit hard to use at first, with a little practice and time, you can create some beautiful work with this program.

The next slide is some examples of just a few things that can be done with Gimp.

Examples

Gimp Downloading

Gimp can be downloaded at (Windows/PC) -http://www.gimp.org/downloads/ Click on the button that reads Download Gimp 2.6.11 (or whatever the current version is)

Gimp Downloading (Mac)

For Mac Users you must first download a program that will allow Gimp to open correctly which can be downloaded at -http://xquartz.macosforge.org/downloads/Leopard/X11-2.5.3.dmg (For Leopard - OSX users)

OR http://xquartz.macosforge.org/downloads/SL/XQuartz-2.5.3.dmg (For Snow Leopard - OSX users)

Then you can download Gimp itself at- http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimponosx/files/GIMP%20Help/GIMP-2.6-User-Manual-en.zip/download

Download some programs, and have fun! Don’t forget to check out the guides and tutorials for these programs!