Editing Digital Photography

by Ed Mercer

     Everything you used to do with your film camera you can still do with your digital camera. But that is where digital photography and film photography camparisons end. Now you can edit and manipulate your digital photographs into any art form you can imagine which is not possible with film photography. You no longer need a seperate camera with black and white, infared, or any other kind of specialized film because everything can be edited and manipulated to produce those results. Most cameras come with  their own editing software or you can purchase an inexpensive user friendly software to edit your digital photographs. We use Adobe Photoshop in our studio which is fairly expensive, but Photoshop Elements which is a scaled down version of Photoshop which does just about anything you would want is very affordable. Now you can do anything you can imagine to your digital photographs. If there is someone in your photograph that you dont want in there, with a little practice you can take them out of the photograph and nobody would ever know. If you have blemishes or small imperfections that you dont like, you can retouch your photographs and make yourself or someone else in the photograph look better than ever. If you over or under expose your photographs, with just a little tweak your photograph is as good as new. You can also blend more than one photograph with another (or parts of another photograph) and create your own visual masterpieces. We like to save sunsets, skylines, cloud formations, or whatever you like into different folders on our computer so that we might blend them together into photographs which might need help. For instance, if you got a great scenic photograph but did not like the sky, you could blend a sunset or skyline that you like from one of your folders onto the scenic which had the sky you did not like. The possibilities to bring out your creativity are endless, and you will be amazed at what you can do with a little practice.