An Introduction To Photo Editing Tools
Photo editing tools range from basic to highly sophisticated. Most photo editing packages will have the tools to let you to crop, rotate, stretch and zoom images, and also give the ability to tinker with the colour and lighting. A more sophisticated photo editing package will have tools for cloning, layering and opacity.
Cropping, rotating and stretching are the three most basic photo editing tools, and many of these are available in word processing software such as Microsoft Word.
Essentially, the photo editing crop tool allows you do digitally do the equivalent of getting out a pair of scissors and cutting off unwanted bits. The level of precision offered by a crop tool will depend on the exact photo editing tool you have. If you want to get creative with collages and montages, then a look for a photo editing tool that will allow you to crop around the outline of individual images as well as cookie-cutter shapes.
Rotation is another basic photo editing tool that allows you to spin the image around to a new angle. Flipping is a similar photo editing tool that allows you to create a mirror image of the original photo. Even with these basic tools, you can have a lot of fun with editing photos. Let's say that you took a photo of your brother with one fist in the air and another of a lovely sunset. You could edit this photo by first using the crop tool to cut around the outline of your brother. Use the rotate tool on this cropped image so it looks as if he's approximately horizontal, then layer this image over the photo of the sunset so he's in the sky. Hey presto - your brother is flying through the air like a superhero, thanks to a few basic photo editing tools. But you don't have to stop there. With some other photo editing tools, you can make this image of SuperBrother into something really dramatic (which would make a cool homemade present once printed). By adjusting the lighting on the background photo of the sunset to make it darker but not using this photo editing tool on the image of your brother, it will seem as if your brother is glowing slightly. And you could take this "glow" even further with another photo editing tool - tinting. Add a thin line of yellowish white around your brother's outline and he shines! But what if that original photo of your brother showed him with smears of grease all over his jeans and there's a mass of power lines in the photo of the sunset that wreck the impact? This is where a cloning tool comes in handy for editing your photo. A cloning photo editing tool allows you to "paint" a texture (e.g. the clean bits of the denim) over the bits you want covered. These photo editing tools are just some of the many that are available. Others will allow you to give your photo special effects (e.g. making your image look as if it's an old-fashioned mezzotint) or touch up flaws in the photo (or the original image!). If you're just beginning to edit photos, don't limit yourself to a package with just a few tools. Get a package with a range of photo editing tools and have fun!
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