Digital SLR Cameras & Photography For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 11. Fixing Up Your Images

In This Chapter

• Checking out available image editors

• Fixing up photographs

If you're really, really good at digital SLR photography, your images might not need any fixing at all, right? Dream on. Nobody's that good; even the most sharp-eyed shooter still uses image editing, or what the cognoscenti refer to as post-processing. (It'd take some major mojo for a photographer to perform pre-processing on images before they were taken!)

Thanks to the miracles of image editing, you can take that perfect composition and create an entirely new picture by judicious cropping. Perhaps you can modify your perfect exposure to produce a special high-contrast effect or a low-contrast moody look. You can creatively twist great color balance with oddball colors. You might even find that the perfect shot of the Eiffel Tower looks even better if you transplant the structure to a cornfield in Kansas.

Image editing is a skill anyone can master. One of the best things about digital photography is that your images are digital all the way. You don't need to scan film or a print or do any conversion. What you shot is what you got — a digital image full of pixels just waiting to be tweaked, fine-tuned, shifted around, and optimized. You can do a lot of that in your camera, but for even greater image enhancement, you need an editor, such as Adobe Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, ...