- Editing your photos
- Using special effect filters
- Preparing your photos for e-mail and the Web
Editing your photos
Now it's time to polish the photos you've scanned and saved. You can use image editing software like Photoshop or PaintShop Pro, if you have them. Or your scanner may be bundled with a basic image editing program like Photoshop Elements. You can also try a free photo editing program like IrfanView.
Most graphics program offer a number of techniques for altering images. A few common ones include correcting the colour of your image with level equalisation, colour curve adjusting, colour balance, and brightness/contrast.
Tip: Make a backup copy of all your photos before your start editing. Put the untouched scanned image files aside (burning them onto a CD is a good choice). This way, you can fearlessly make bold changes to your photos knowing that you've got the originals stashed away in case you go "too far" with the edits.
- With level equalisation, you can adjust the brightness and contrast in an image and make the midtones darker or lighter to bring out the detail. Some applications refer to this tool as "levels" or "equalisation."
- The colour curve adjustment tool, sometimes called "curves", allows you to map pixels to new bright and dark values by dragging along the points in a curve. All the hues surrounding the point you drag on the curve will also adjust to some degree. This makes the brightness change look more natural.
- Colour balance allows you to adjust the different colour ranges, to bring out the colours at one end of the range or the other.
- Brightness/contrast tools are the easiest tools to use. They increase both the image pixel luminance, and the difference between the lightest and darkest pixels.
You can also correct an image with pixel editing tools such as sharpness and cropping:
- The sharpen tool makes an image look crisper, less blurry. Watch out, though, as too much sharpness creates a "frosty" halo around objects, which can be just as unattractive as the blur that the tool was used to correct. The unsharp mask tool sharpens subtly and, in the instance of blurred scans, can work wonders.
- Cropping an image removes part of the picture. For instance, if all you care about is the basketball player in the centre of your scan, then crop out any extraneous background, so that your subject matter becomes the main focus of your image.
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