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Welcome to Photo Editing Tips Be sure to Bookmark this site now. We are dedicated to providing you with the best advice and information on photo editing. Photo Editing Overview Photographs capture a moment in time. Photos are generally regarded as "factual," as opposed to a drawing or painting, which would be the artist's interpretation. Photos tend to be trusted more, because they accurately depict what was in front of the camera at the moment the picture was taken. 
The concept of photo editing is almost as old as photography itself. The first photographic images were recorded in the 1820s, and one of the first widely known edited photos was a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Sometime in the 1860s, someone took a standing portrait of Southern Congressman John Calhoun, pasted in Lincoln's face from the portrait for the five dollar bill, and created a historic photo of Lincoln on the spot. Even an action as simple and innocent as cropping the picture can be controversial. Imagine a scene of the wreckage left by a tornado. If the photographer cropped out all of the damage, and focused instead on a single building that somehow survived, it would appear that the tornado hadn't damaged very much at all. In today's world of digital photography, some photo editing is necessary on nearly every picture. Digital cameras have to "guess" at the proper color, contrast, and shading of the pictures they take, and proper use of photo editing tools can correct or even enhance the camera's guesswork. At the same time, digital photographers must keep in mind that photography--especially journalistic photography--is meant to be a record of a moment in time, and not an artistic recreation of what the photographer wants his audience to see. While editing photographs has become quicker and easier, the temptation to alter the photographs has risen as well. 
Let's say you're on vacation. You've just taken a fantastic picture with your brand-new SupraUltraMax 18 megapixel camera, and you want to ship it home to all your friends and family. You find an internet cafe in the middle of a foreign country, pull the chip from your camera, and get ready to email it home--and that's when you discover that your terrific new camera stores terrifically large images. There's no way you can email a twenty-seven megabyte image back home. What's worse, this Internet Cafe computer doesn't have any image-editing programs on it, so you can't find any way to crop or compress the image, either. Are you stuck waiting until you get home to share your images? Not necessarily. With the rise of broadband, several websites have popped up on the 'net offering the ability to upload and edit pictures right there on the website. Phixr is regarded as one of the better online editors. They have a wide variety of tools available, like Red Eye removal, Sepia conversion, OCR recognition, and Borders. They also have third-party agreements with such websites as Costco, Flickr, and Livejournal, allowing you to edit your photo online and immediately upload it to the other site. However, Phixr is not a storage site--they remove all pictures about three hours after editing is done. PXN8 (think license plate, it's pronounced Pixenate) has a feature called Bookmarklet that speeds up image loading. An image can be uploaded and opened in PXN8 with two mouse clicks. It has a wide variety of features and abilities, and is a favorite of reviewers because of the speed and ease of workflow. Pixoh has one of the best interfaces of all the onlie photo editors, and one of the largest filesize limits (it will allow you to edit images up to ten megabytes in size). Unfortunately, so far it only offers a few basic features, like rotate and resize. |
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