Digital Photo Help Is Available Everywhere
A lot of the old problems that occurred in the days of film have vanished with the advent of the digital camera and the digital photo. No more waiting for half a week to get your prints back only to find that out of a roll of 24 exposures, ten were decent (apart from a red eye or two), two chopped someone's head off, three were underexposed because you left the flash off, one had a picture of your feet and the floor because you accidentally took a photo while winding the film on, and the other four were hopelessly out of focus. Digital photos have been a lot of help in this area.
But there's still a bit of a gap between the digital photos we can take and the pictures you see produced by professional photographers. But a few simple tips and tools will help you create digital photos that are arresting and beautiful.
One common problem that can often occur when a photo has too much empty space. Imagine you've taken a shot of a gnarly old tree in winter against a field of perfect snow. While a bit of empty space is fine and will give a good bit of contrast between the tree and the snow, too much can make the tree look "lost" and reduce the overall impact.
To help fix this digital photo, cropping and stretching are the tools to use. First crop the digital photo so that the tree becomes the focal point and most of the distracting background is lost. Then stretch the image so the cropped image is the same size as the original uncropped picture. This will help your digital photo of the winter tree look like a real work of art. Skin tones are another common problem with many amateur photos. Even professional photographers consider this to be a problematic area and the benchmark by which cameras and digital photo software is judged, so it's not surprising that others need help with this. The easiest way to fix this is to take your digital photo to a professional image processor and get their help. However, if you want to help yourself, then you can tinker with the colour and saturation of your digital photo to reduce red tones so your subject doesn't look as though they have a bad case of sunburn. Red eyes/retinal reflection is often an aspect of digital photos that most of us need some help with. While most digital photo software packages offer some help with this, sometime you may need a more sophisticated level of help. Imagine you've taken a digital photo of your black cat against the night sky. It's a dramatic shot, but the cat's eyes have turned green with the flash, even though they only seemed to have a golden glow to the naked eye. Using a standard red eye reduction tool will help remove that glassy green look, but the resulting digital photo won't have those glowing eyes. A professional digital photo processing company can remove the glassy look but still keep that magical glow.
| 
