Photo Gathering and Editing #4

How to Edit Photos

If anything is more difficult than taking good photos, it might be editing photos. It seems like there is a whole language about editing that is foreign and confusing. I must confess that I am quite the novice in editing, but I'm learning more all the time.

There are a lot of different things you can do with photo editing. Most of what you will need to do is pretty simple - crop, lighten, darken, or maybe delete an area. The good news is that stuff is available in free and easy software all over the place. You can do all that right inside PowerPoint 2007 (and word on the street is that 2010 is going to have even more options). So for the very basic stuff, don't stress, just grab a free piece of software (or do it in PowerPoint) and crop away.

But if you have something that you want that just doesn't exist with the photos that you've seen, you might want to look at doing some hardcore editing. I created a new logo for this site with some photo editing software called Paint.Net - it is powerful and free versus Photoshop which can be over $500 for the full version.

The key to learning to do more advanced photo editing is to take your time. Any good software will let you undo anything you do (as far back as you want to go).

I was able to take these two images and combine them into a logo for this site. It took me all afternoon and part of the next day, but I finally got it to where I like it.

I'll tell you more about that later, though.