There was a time in photography that the image you took was the image you got. Altering your image was an art known by few and available to fewer than that. With the technology available through digital imaging this is no longer the case.

Images can be edited to unheard of levels of manipulative wizardry. Users can go beyond just retouching a photo and practically reinvent the image.

Blemishes no longer have to be an embarrassment in a photo. With Photoshop’s retouching tools, you can erase the most severe acne with a few simple keystrokes.

Damaged photos? Are they ripped or torn? Even worse, are they a family heirloom that could never be replaced? Don’t worry, Photoshop can take a scanned photo and retouch tears, scars, water damage and more to make the photograph like new again. It can even revitalize colors that might have faded over the years.

Is their an ex in a picture that you would otherwise love? Erase them! You can remove them from your photo as if they were never there to begin with. In fact, you can remove almost any unwanted object from you photo. If only life were that easy!

Restoring old photos to former glory and retouching other photos is one of the great advances in modern photography, due in large part to Photoshop. Start learning how Adobe Photoshop can make your photos sparkle!

Sometimes, clear lines that separate the images in the panorama may appear. It is possible to blend the lines so that they disappear. Select the Advance Blending option located at the right of the Photomerge window, then select Preview. Inconsistencies in color will be calculated by the program.

At this point, the images will blend together. Photoshop will combine all the individual images for your panoramic into a single layer. If you select the Keep as Layers option it is easier to edit each image individually. This is a great help if one of the images is brighter or darker then the other images. You can select that image in layers and adjust the brightness for just that image.

It is a good idea to save the layers as a .psd file so that you can always come back and correct any mistakes or make any changes later. It’s a real pain to have to redo everything from scratch just if you made a mistake or want to change something later.

You can also distort the pictures so that the scene will look like it is in perspective. Choose the Perspective option on the bottom of Settings. You can also do this by choosing Set Vanishing Point in the Photomerge window, then click to an area in the panorama.

Take the Saturation slider and slide it to the left until the skin color looks pretty good, or the best that you can get it without looking fake. Don’t worry about the other parts of the picture right now.

Just concentrate on the skin color. We will fix the background colors next. Once you are satisfied with your skin color, click OK to close out of the Hue/Saturation window, and you will see your new layer above your original picture.

If you notice though, the adjustment that you made affected the entire image. To get that back restored to normal, click on the layer mask part of the new layer, and grab your brush tool. Make sure that your foreground color is set to black, and you have a large enough brush so that you are not brushing the background back a long time.

Now, using black, brush in the parts of the photo that you want to restore back to normal. I usually brush in the whole picture except the skin areas that I wanted to fix. This gives me the most realistic look

The resolution of your computer’s monitor can greatly affect the outcome of your photos. This is the amount of pixels there are on the screen. The more there are, generally, the better the quality of the images.

Making sure you have a monitor that is suited for photo editing is an important part of the process. However, you must remember that certain resolutions are meant for certain sized monitors.

A large resolution on a small monitor makes everything too small, whereas the opposite makes everything too big. Make sure you know what resolution your monitor is made for. The display resolution of a digital television or computer display typically refers to the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed.

Some commentators also use this term to indicate a range of input formats that the display’s input electronics will accept and often include formats greater than the screen’s native grid size even though they have to be down-scaled to match the screen’s parameters.

An example of pixel shape affecting “resolution” or perceived sharpness is displaying more information in a smaller area using a higher resolution, which makes the image much clearer.

Online photo albums are a great feature offered by some of the better printing services. With their affordable pricing and membership programs, online photo albums are increasing in popularity as a way for friends and family to see updated pictures online.

All you have to do is direct everyone to a website you are given for your photos to be viewed. Remember that basic albums are simple and easy to design and update, but the more features and options that are offered, the more complex it will be to manage.

A user friendly online photo editing tool or software is vital. Many companies have these available but some are not so simple to use. Editing will make a dramatic difference in the quality of the final print. Make use of the online software provided by your printing company if you are a novice photo editor.

The results are more likely to be just right if you use a software that the printer is also more used to seeing.

When photos are saved on a computer, they frequently become slightly blurred. They are not necessarily so blurry that you can’t see the image; they are merely not as clear as they could be.

Just about all photo-editing programs have a tool that allows you to sharpen your image. When your image could use some sharper detail, this is the option you want to use. It makes for a much better-looking picture. Some cameras have the tool built in, though sometimes that is not enough, and it may have to be done again with your editing software.

Sharpen filters bring out detail in images by increasing the contrast of pixels next to one another. More advanced image editing programs offer several options such as Sharpen, Sharpen More, Sharpen Edges and Unsharp Mask (USM). Unsharp Mask gives you a lot of control over how an image is sharpened. Sometimes a photo will benefit from selective sharpening. You select an area with a programs selection tool and only sharpen the area.

The important thing is not sharpen an image too much. The sharpening tool that is most useful for photographs is the Unsharp Mask, now available in most raster programs. The Unsharp Mask searches through your image looking for where colors change, and sharpens those areas. The Unsharp Mask is superior to any other sharpening because it makes decisions based on adjacent pixels, not random color changes, so it usually can find and sharpen just the true edges of color areas.

Along with the importance of editing photos comes the importance of viewing your images. In order to easily access your photos your photo viewer should be able to be customized, easy to use, have printable contact sheets, photo enhancement tools, convenient for getting the pictures, be able to manage EXIF data and be able to batch process images.

Some good photo viewers are Zoner Photo Studio which is quite user friendly and Photophilia which is very adjustable and able to batch process. Base what photo viewer you use from your computer skills comfort level.

You can choose a viewer that is quick and easy or a more complex viewer that offers more functions. Some functions that are especially helpful are the slide show, batch processor, editor functions and zoom factor.

Another popular question for people is how to convert photo files to get smaller pictures. This process is beneficial if you want to send photos over the internet. You can do this in two ways known as the lossless and lossy formats.

Basically, one of these two methods can be used to create a smaller nearly untouched photo. Lossless means that the image appears the same as it was originally only smaller, but only to a certain degree. The drawback is that the final image may still be too big but it is completely unchanged. The most common form it is saved in is .png.

Lossy formats will actually lose some information. The advantage to this method is you will be able to chose 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. You will have to decide what will work best for you. Do you want a smaller original or do you mind sacrificing some of the photograph in order to make it as small as you want.

The resizing of a photograph is another commonly used tool today. Re-sampling is similar to resizing but is not as familiar to many.

Let’s take a look at the difference between the two.

Resizing changes the pixels while re-sampling uses an actual algorithm to adjust the picture to appear to not be blurry, fuzzy or blocked. Some of the pixels will be doubled when using resizing to enlarge a picture.With resizing some of the pixels will be removed when reducing an image resulting in some lines of the photo disappearing.

Re-sampling however uses algorithms to determine the new size of the pixels. When re-sampling to a larger size, color will be added as a result of interpolation. When reducing an image through re-sampling, the actual pixels will be re-calculated. A good image editor will have multiple algorithms for resizing and re-sampling options.

Many people have trouble knowing how or whether or not in the first place to edit their digital photos. Most photographs just don’t turn out the way you imagined; they might be too dark, or too red, or too big. Depending on what you need in a digital photo-editing program, you may want to get a more simple or a slightly more advanced software.

For example, if all you’re planning on doing is correcting a few minor details in a picture, you want to go as simple as possible. If you’re planning on adding things to pictures or taking them out, or changing the color of objects, you will want a more advanced program.

If you have a rather plain photograph, or a black and white picture, there are ways to manipulate the colors to make the picture more interesting. Your editing program will probably have a way to enhance the color of a picture, or you can completely change the color of an object.

If you learn to use the tools well, you could be able to convert a black and white picture to color. You can also create aged effects, or make a picture grayscaled. Experiment with your program and find out what you can do to improve the coloring of your picture

Here is a short video on You Tube on how to add color to a black and white photo, using Photoshop