Unique Photo Techniques: Use Digital Photo Editing Software to Punch Up your Pictures
23 June 2009
Author: Catherine Matthews-Scanlon
Digital photo editing isn’t limited to adjusting the contrast, removing red-eye or cropping unwanted areas from your favorite and not so favorite digital images anymore. You can turn all of your digital images into gorgeous photos by using basic photo editing features from most types of photo editing software available today. You might ask, “Why would I want to change the look of my photo?” There are many reasons that we can explore, but the main reason for me is that I want to add a unique look to my photo, one that matches my style and makes the page layout stand out from others. Other reasons include: loving a style of painting but aren’t sure about painting one for a scrapbook page, or if your photo includes people that you don’t want in your scrapbook, changing the emphasis from a background to the person in the foreground.
Changing the look of your image by applying one or many of the different pre-determined filters to your image is typically how I apply different looks to my images. Using the filters feature in my photo editing software couldn’t be any easier than choosing the Artistic, Texture, Distorted or Sketched tabs; then choose the filter style I want to apply to my photo, then I adjust the individual settings that look best for my photo; choose OK and I’m done! I have discovered that the default settings for most the filters look great, but it’s pretty easy to make adjustments to these settings to make them look more like your style.
For the page, Close My Eyes I applied a basic Artistic Filter to the forest photograph. The Palette Knife filter has three settings that can be adjusted: Stroke Size, Stroke Detail and softness. As you adjust these settings the preview window shows you what your final design will look like. I adjusted the stroke size to a smaller one and cropped my image to better enhance the forest. After I adjusted the contrast/brightness I was happy with the way my photo looked.
In the example Wisdom I got a little more involved with editing. For this photo I wanted to make my son pop out from the background; I decided that a Gaussian Blur would work best for what I wanted to accomplish. Because I wanted to apply the filter only to the background, I needed to preserve crispness of the figure in the foreground. To do that, I used the magnetic lasso tool to select only my son; once I had highlighted the entire figure I copied and pasted it into a new workspace while I worked on the background of my original file. Once I had a good copy of the image I was free to apply the Gaussian Blur filter to the background. Once I was happy with the filter settings that I had applied to the background, I pasted the image back into the original file and moved it around to it’s original location. After a couple of other touch ups I was ready to print my picture for my scrapbook page.
On the page Shadow Fun I applied a basic filter adjustment called “Posterize” to all the images and printed them on photo paper. For the large shadows that were cut out from the cardstock and stitched on, I converted the photo to Black and White before I printed it out.
Digital photo editing isn’t as hard as you might think! I hope you’ll get started editing your photos today; be sure to share your results in the creative gallery!