In Digital photography, enhancement is very helpful to help you edit your pictures. Sometimes an original looks so bad, it appears as if nothing can be done to help it. Not true! A couple commonly used enhancements are angle correction of slanted pictures and barrel and pincushion correction. The angle correction basically defines itself in the title. If the picture is slightly titled then the angle correction enhancement will help it out quite a bit. One thing the tool needs to have is anti-aliasing. Barrel and pincushion correction is used to fix slanted horizons that were caused by the camera being used to zoom up as far is could go. These enhancements are used mainly for generally annoying changes that some people wouldn't even notice unless it was dramatic, but are useful nonetheless.
To resize or to resample, that is the question. The answer to that question is really what your editor has and what you feel like doing. Resizing is a lot simpler than re-sampling but doesn't turn out as nice. This is because when you reduce an image with resizing a few pixels will be deleted altogether. When enlarging an image by resizing the pixels will be doubled or even tripled. This creates a fuzzy or blocky image. While re-sampling uses algorithms to either interpolate (enlarging the image by adding color to pixels) or reduce images by re-calculating all the pixels in the photo. Decent image editors will have a few algorithms for re-sampling and resizing will be an available option.
Big question for everyone is how to convert photo files in order to get smaller pictures. This is really helpful if you want to send photo files over the internet. There are two ways to do this: the lossless and the lossy formats. Lossless means that the image stays exactly the same as it was originally. Basically different methods are applied to get a smaller but virtually untouched photo. The most common format that photo software can hand is .png. The disadvantage is the image can still end up too big, but the image will be completely unchanged. Lossy formats will actually lose some information. The advantage to this way is you will be able to pick the size you want it to end up in. The common form it is saved in is a .jpg. This will create small photos that will upload places quite easily. There are the ups and downs for both of these forms, basically do you want a smaller original or do you mind some of the photo being lost in order to make it really small.
When it comes to viewing images, having a good image viewer is essential to the image master and beginner. Having the ability to access and edit your photos is important and helpful for someone in the digital photography business and hobby. A couple of acceptable viewers would be Photophila and Zoner Photo Studio. These two are user friendly and have photo enhancement abilities, zoom function, batch processor, and it is easy to add photos to the database. They both can manage EXIF data have slide show and edition options. Be careful when choosing a photo viewer it is quite important for the digital photographer.
When you want to you don't have do edit a whole bunch of images at a time. Having something that will control all the changes you want made to a large amount of images. If you want the images resizes it is very easy. There are bunch of types of batch processors. Each has its ups and downs, some photo viewers even have batch software that comes with them. A good example of what you want a batch processor to is have a large amount of images in one directory ready to go. Then you tell the software what to do, e.g. 50 images that need to be resized to 100 x 50 pixels then add a watermark and compress the image to 5kb to be transferred in email. Then you tell the program to run and within the next hour your images will be all ready to go.
A handy tool to have if you don't intend to collect thousands of pictures is a digital photo album. This is handy because you can add descriptions and make sure you get a nice looking album for people to look at. This is different from a photo view because it actually stores all the photos no matter where they are located. The program will actually go and find all your photos. This would not be recommended if you have more than 2,000 photos because if a file gets corrupted you could lose all your pictures. An online viewer would actually be useful because then after you used a batch processor you could upload them all to the site and have just as nice of an album online. In the end it is up to you whether even want an album in the first place.
Everyday many questions come in about the many processes with digital photography: Q: I had a hard drive crash. A recovery software program recovered a number of digital photos but for some reason saved them with the file extension ".PHB". Photoshop can't open this file so I can't change it. Any ideas? A: A file with an unknown and bad file extension should be renamed first. After that it can be opened again. Easy recipes to rename a file or to rename a bunch of files at Rename File Extension. Q: My roommate, thinking to help save space, compressed my photos and saved them at the new smaller size. How can I undo it? A: First it is important to note that photo compression and photo resizing are 2 completely different things. The short answer is that neither photo compression nor photo resizing can be undone, since a part of the original information is lost and can not be retrieved by magic. There is a more detailed explanation at Photo resizing versus photo compression.
