Source:www.jimippolito.com
Here's something that will allow you to make your digital photos better, at home, and it's totally free, and fun.

Chances are you got a free "image editing" program with your digital camera, and possibly with your printer or scanner. Believe it or not but some of these free programs are pretty damn good, and easy to use.

These programs allow you to apply a variety of manipulations to the digital images you download to your computer such as cropping, straightening, redeye reduction, and what we are exploring today, digital enhancement of your photos.

The photo above is shown exactly as it came from my digital camera. It's OK, but the wide tonal range and extreme lighting conditions caused the camera's light meter to average the scene and it resulted, to my eyes, in a slightly washed out image.

So I used a free version of "Photoshop Elements" program that came with my $99.95 canon scanner and touched it up a bit.

This is the result:


Source:www.jimippolito.com
Believe me, I'm no expert with these programs but I think the slightly reworked image is far better with more saturated colors and increased contrast. OK, the shadow detail, such as the tree trunks suffered a bit, but they weren't the focal point of the shot, the colors are, and I think they are far more vivid now.

What do you think?

Of course your tastes may be different than mine so you can make your photos lighter, darker, sharper, softer, add or subtract contrast, etc, to suit your own idea of "right."
Basically these programs all utilize the same principle but some have more options than others, and they all have their own correction curves so you may want to run the same image file through a few of these programs to see which one works best for you.

Some have a "quick fix" or an overall "enhance" option, and most do a pretty good job. However, you'll soon find that you will want to experiment with contrast, brightness, and even the level of enhancement that is applied.

You'll find these features under different headers such as "Options," "Enhance," "Edit," "Filters," and other titles, depending on the program.

One caution, never apply the changes to the only copy you have of an image file. Always keep your originals in a separate folder, and create a copy that you can play with, in another folder, preferably identified with the name of the program you used.

Change the file identifier by adding something like a letter after the file number when you save the manipulated images so you can always tell which one is altered. This way when you screw a file up, and you will, you can just delete the disaster, copy the original unaltered file again, and start over, in your experimental folder.

Better yet, burn the originals to a CD or DVD right after downloading, so you have a backup, backup copy.

Here are two free programs that I use and recommend:

"Irfanview", a funny name for a great free program.

"Picasa2" is a free program from Google that many consider to be the best of the free ones, and better than many expensive ones.

Don't forget to try the programs that may have been bundled with your digital camera and other computer peripherals.

I'm currently testing a few more free image editors and as soon as I'm satisfied that they're worth using I'll report on them.

Have fun!