Simple Ways to Edit Your Photos in Photoshop

Photoshop allows some essential and basic photographic editing to be done, but even just the most basic processes can greatly enhance images for both amateur and professional photographers. Photoshop is also known for its creative capabilities as well as its aesthetic corrective tools.



Eliminate the Ever Devastating Red Eye
Many group, holiday or special events photographs are ruined by the occurrence of a photographic phenomenon known as "red eye," which is simply light reflecting back from the wide-open pupil of the subject(s). Some digital cameras have a flash setting meant to conquer red-eye occurrences, but they are not always a guarantee against it. Photoshop has a red-eye tool to identify, diminish or completely eliminate the appearance of red eye in an image. With Photoshop, you can remove all red eyes, even those of your cat or dog.

Create Clearer and Brighter Photos
Another Photoshop tool meant to help clean up an image or improve its appearance is the suite of color enhancing tools that will increase or decrease contrast and hue and brightness. This allows a photographer to manually adjust an image's color settings to give it the sharpest and cleanest appearance possible, even when you're starting out with an all too dark image.

Who is that Person in the Background? Crop them Out!
Photoshop also has several tools for cropping an image, or cutting elements out of a picture all together. The cropping feature allows for an image to be resized and enhanced, meaning that a group image taken from too far a distance and with too great of an allowance of background can be cropped down to fill the frame and refocused to be clear and sharp at the new focused setting. Or, if there's someone in the photo you don't know or aren't fond of, you can simply cut them out.

Get Artistic
For more artful experiments, Photoshop allows color images to be altered to black and white or even altered to a whole variety of hues and colors. There are a tremendous numbers of palettes, tools and filters to apply to images to great effect. A color photograph can be cropped or resized, have all of the colors reversed and the hues changed, or filters applied to make the image appear to be textured or created from another medium such as a painting. The experimentation possible with the software program is almost limitless. As both an image repair program and an artist's tool, Photoshop is a good place to explore photography and photographic enhancement.