Editing for a better picture #photography

In the old days of film photography, any post shoot editing was done by a technician in the processing lab. Now we can do our own editing on the computer. Editing has become as much a skill as the photography with every laughter line getting edited out of portrait photography!

Editing is a creative part of photography and I try to be be quite subtle with editing.

Photoshop is popular, but I don’t have the patience to learn it. I have used it but not with impressive results. I use Windows Live Gallery which is free and for the more artistic edits PhotoScape, which again is a free download. I have some other software like Corel Aftershot that I use occasionally.

Stray light often makes a photo a little hazy and just adding contrast can get rid of that hazy effect. You can sometimes get rid of ‘noise’ too, that shows up as colour blotches or white dots. You can even add noise in Photoscape, but not random noise, adding it in a pattern can be an interesting effect.

You can also convert your photos to sepia or grey scale in editing for something that little bit different. Editing can be fun and art in it’s own right. The number of different effects with even a simple program like Photoscape runs into millions as you combine different effects. I even edit with Live Gallery and do secondary editing with Photoscape. Photoscape has a colorize option that is useful. If you want to do monochrome, but not sepia or grey scale, then convert your photo to sepia and then colorize it with a yellow green tint. Or you can give your photo a period look with colorize. I tend to do a yellow sepia type tint for the Victorian era and a yellow greenish tint for the Edwardian era. If you watch TV programmes like Downton Abbey you will see similar techniques used to colour the video footage.

I’ll end with some photos from the library. Remember you can share your view in the comments box. You can also subscribe or follow me on twitter.