Tools of the Trade: Photo Editing by Lala C. Ballatan

Tools of the Trade: Photo Editing by Lala C. Ballatan

With digital cameras becoming a hit not only to professional photographers, it is understandable that creations of digital image files are also increasing. It is actually the magic of being able to manipulate your photosedit and organize them and make certain special effects that digital image files become interesting and essential. In order to keep in line with the best and easiest ways of editing, organizing and storing digital photos, latest software application programs for digital photo enhancements are being introduced.

Here, we give you an overview of the features of some of the newest tools to maximize your digital image editing efforts:

1.Adobe Photoshop Elements 3this latest offering of Adobe offers enhanced features not only for editing your digital photos but also helps you in organizing your files. Ten new features makes it an all-in-one home photo solution: 1)could perfect, transform, organize and share your digital photos; 2) ability to brush away flaws on your photo; 3) can create dynamic slideshows; 4) can send themed photo e-mail; 5) you can enjoy flexible print options;6) you could get high quality images with camera raw and 16-bit support; 7) youre given the chance to pick your best shot from among many; 8) photos for safekeeping can be archived; 9) gives you the full color range, and; 10) have intuitive capability to instantly fix common flaws.

Cant wait to get your hands on this new software? You may expect its shipping on November. It costs $99.99 and can be ordered from the Adobe Site!

2.Microsofts Digital Image Suite 10this offering by Microsoft debuted last month, with expanded set of tools to satisfy your passion for digital photography. This includes all new features found in Digital Image Pro and more and Digital Image Library for those dead set in a digital photography career0.

Several innovative features are: 1) by cataloging photos in Digital Image Library guarantee you quick storing and retrieving of photos; 2) with Photo Story 2.0, you could create videos using your photos, with all the audio-visual effects; 3) as you view your photos, flags allow you to designate the next-steps to do with your photos; 4) on-click Auto Fixes help you adjust color, exposure and more; 5) complex editing problems can be handled easily with Color and Exposure toolsets; 6) Panoramic Stitching lets you piece together multiple horizontal and vertical photos; 7) allows precise adjustments over five curves; 8) you can remove unwanted noise in your pictures; 9) with Fix Red Eye Tool to remove red eye from photos; 9) can delete unwanted things in the background of your photo by the Smart Erase tool.

Good news! Its available on the market already and costs $129.

If the two tools given above doesnt satisfy you enough, you could still have other reliable tools for your Photo Editing. You may try Jacs Paint Shop Pro 9 and Apples iPhoto for other needed features to help you with your Digital Images. -30-

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About the Author
Lala C. Ballatan is a 26 year-old Communication Arts graduate.Book reading has always been her greatest passion -- mysteries, horrors, psycho-thrillers, historical documentaries and classics.

Her writing prowess began as early as she was 10 years old in girlish diaries. With writing, she felt freedomto express her viewpoints and assert it, to bring out all concerns -- imagined and observed, to bear witness.

Create Your Own Digital Library by Jelaine Macaraeg

Create Your Own Digital Library by Jelaine Macaraeg

The moment you got your first digital camera, your view of the world has totally changed. You always seem to see something beautiful or artistic in your surroundings, worthy of being captured in pixels. You experiment quite a lot and keep on loading your pictures in your computer. Until one day, you thought of working on a project. Youre sure you have the kind of picture you needyou knew you have it somewhere in your hard disk in one of those folders You cant run a search for it though because you pretty much use generic filenames like Flower1, Flower2, Flower 3 and so on. Uh-oh! Looks like its high time for you to organize your digital photos!

Microsoft has something that can help you do that. Its called the Microsoft Digital Image Suite 9, which actually consists of two imaging applicationsMS Digital Image Library 9, which serves as your database of digital images and MS Digital Image Pro 9, which is a photo manipulation program.

A lot of people may like its familiar Explorer-like interfacethe left pane being the folder pane, while the right side of the window is the image browser, showing thumbnails of your images.

The good thing about Digital Image Library 9 is that you wouldnt have to transfer your photos from their current location. Instead, it scans your hard disk and locates folders it considers photo folders, afterwhich you may deselect folders that are not appropriate. The images may then be sorted according to date or keywords. From here, you may double-click on a photo to bring it up in a full-screen view and use the basic controls for zoom, fit to screen, rotate and print. You may also select multiple photos for slideshow, the speed of which range from 1 second to 1 minute.

Oftentimes, pictures taken with a digital camera contains metadata. These are information about the photo, such as shutter speed and the date and time the photo was taken. Digital Image Library 9 allows you to add these metadata with captions and keywords to easily categorize and later on identify images. Another nifty feature of this application is that it even allows you to rate your photos! From the preview pane, simply click on how many stars, the highest being five, you wish to assign each photo.

If you wish to do some retouches on an image, simply click the edit button and Digital Image Pro 9 launches and opens the selected image. This application has a lot of quick-fix features such as the Red Eye tool and the Smart Erase, which caters to novice retouchers and home users who dont want anything complicated.

Being the all-in-one application that it is, Microsoft Digital Image Suite 9 comes with tons of mats, frames and templates for creating professional photo projects such as scrapbooks, photo albums, calendars and postcards. You may also get Microsoft Photo Story, an add-on to the suite that lets you turn your photos into video. Simply choose which photos to include then add some narration if you have a microphone and add music and zooming effects.

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About the Author
I like to read anything that contains words in the old English form, though I cant understand it. You know, the King James Version of the Bible with words like thou, thy, thine, wilst, etc. I also like gothic metal, a music genre, because most of the lyrics contain such words. It is not only the words that fascinate me; its the hidden meaning it contains. Its like an abstract painting; you dont get the real picture until you see through it.