Image Manipulation Essentials: How to Play with Your Digital Pictures

In order to manipulate images digitally, you need digital images to work with. Once you have your digital camera, it is time to have fun and take some pictures so you can play around with them later in your computer. Many cameras include software for basic image editing. These software are often poor and don't give you a lot of options to edit your images; they might give you the basic functionality like the ability to crop, move, cut, and sometimes a couple of filters, but they feel very handicapped especially when you have worked with other programs such as Corel or Photoshop.

Photoshop from Adobe is perhaps the best software available for image editing. It is used as the standard in the industry, and this is due to its amazing tools and endless possibilities for image manipulation. Although Photoshop is great, it can be somewhat expensive for the average computer user, and if your intention is just basic image editing, then you don't need to spend 700 dollars in a computer program. There are other options which are cheaper, including the Photoshop essentials software; this will give you basic functionality to edit photos without the price tag of the complete software package.

Most images are created in JPEG format. This is the standard created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group. Thanks to this standard, it is possible to convert the information from the CCD sensor into a map of colored pixels. This process reduces the size of the picture significantly with only a small loss in quality, which allows users to easily manipulate the images without consuming all the computer's resources.

As a comparison, image manipulation is much easier now than it was in the past. Before the digital era arrived, image manipulation had to be done with an airbrush working over the pictures. This was more difficult, time consuming and you needed to hire a really good artist if you wanted a decent result, but even the best results looked artificial. Now everything is done digitally; it is easier to manipulate pictures and to remove unwanted items, enhance the appearance of people or fix damaged photos. The results obtained now are incredibly realistic and if the image editing is done by a good artist, you won't even notice the image was altered.

If the quality of the image in terms of lighting is poor, you can play with some of the most common image editing tools such as the brightness and contrast. Dark images can be restored into bright and colorful pictures by altering the brightness and contrast of the pictures. The same thing is true with the color levels; you can give nice and warm tones to ugly pictures, or restore the original colors of discolored images by adjusting the levels of reds, blues and greens in different parts of the picture.