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by: DavidPeters
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The advances and conveniences in digital photography make it possible for anyone to take a perfect picture, but how exactly is this possible is we all are not the world's greatest photographer? By touching up your raw images through digital editing you can take what was once an average picture and make it a great photograph. Maybe you needed to lighten your image, crop or rotate a bit and even clean up some dirty spots; this is all quick and simple to do once you know how. Most pictures need some type of adjusting to produce the final image. Take a look at this short guide to help you with the most common touch ups for your photos.

Step 1: Start Up Your Image Editor To get started, you must first choose your favorite image editing program. A program such as Ulead Photo Impact is best for beginners. It is an easy to use tool that still provides professional photo effects.

Step 2: Remove Red-Eye Almost everyone has experienced the red-eye effect when taking pictures of people. This is an easy corrected problem with image editing software. A Red-Eye Removal tool can be found in the menu of Paint Shop Pro that does all of the work for you. Ulead Photo Impact offers the same feature with its Remove Red Eye option in the Tool Panel.

Step 3: Rotate and Crop If you have taken a photo from an uncomfortable angle, this can be fixed with the rotate tool with very little loss to picture quality. You can also opt to crop photos to remove cluttered surroundings that take attention away from the subject of the photo. A much more professional result can be achieved by cropping away empty sides of a photograph leaving only the subject in the middle.

Step 4: Play with Color Experiment with the different color tools for a different look. Through the versatility of digital editing programs you can make the sky green, the whole photo black and white, or give it an antiqued look with a sepia tone. A good photo editing program will have an automatic color balance option to adjust color flaws in your pictures.

Step 5: Blurring Effects Some pictures can be enhanced by using a blurring effect. In this case you would select unimportant areas of the photo to softly blur out to draw more focus to the subject of the photo. An example would be to blur out the background leaves of a picture of a butterfly.

Step 6: Sharpen Up Sharpening the image is the next step in the photo touch up process. You cannot sharpen an out of focus image into clarity contrary to popular belief. The best way to utilize the sharpen tool is to selectively sharpen just a portion of an image such as a person's eyes. Leave the unimportant areas unsharpened to give the focus to your selected area.

Step 7: Resize You may need to resize your photo depending on your needs. Resize down to a smaller size to e-mail your pictures to family. Resize to a 4x6 print to turn your image into a greeting card.

Step 8: Save Your Work We're almost finished. Now all you have to do is save your work in the suitable image format. If you want to save all of the details for future editing, save in the TIFF format. If you want to send the picture by e-mail or upload to a web site, choose the JPEG format for saving the image.

Conclusion That's it! Now you know the basics for touching up and getting your raw digital photos ready for output. While you don't have to use every step listed above, it can give you a starting point to see which ones a certain picture might need. Have fun with your photos, experiment to see what enhancements you like best and practice, practice, practice!

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