Sliding into Perfection

When you take pictures you often only judge the content of the picture. We usually only evaluate the colours, quality and such only sparingly in the pictures we take. They are, however, an important aspect of any photograph or image. Sadly, a lot of pictures and images you may find on the internet, or just pictures you've taken yourself, might be very poor in these areas. Fortunately for us we can easily fix or edit these parts of our pictures using proper knowledge of Adobe Photoshop Elements. So let's look at a few common problems in images and how to fix them.

Colours:
Often a pictures colours may not have come out right, or look strange to you. To fix this problem using Photoshop Elements you alter the levels of RGB in your picture. You can do this by going to enhace>brightness/contrast>levels. From there you will be directed to a pop up screen. That will show a graphic representation of the over all RGB levels in your image and sliders that can help you alter them. You can move those around to lighten or darken your image to your heart's content, but there is also a drop down menu that let's you control the individual levels of the colours red, green and blue in your picture. Just move around some sliders and there you have it!

Image Quality:
Image quality is an entirely different issue. The quality of an image depends on its resolution. The resolution determines how many pixels there are per inch of the image. Pixel is short for picture element. Each pixel is like one dot of colour in an image, the more of these dots there are per inch the sharper, better quality you get in a picture. So when you're creating an image to print remember to always keep your resolution at 300, to get the best results. If you're just putting an image on the internet 72 is the suggested resolution so it doesn't take as much time to load and use up large amounts of bandwidth. It's hard to increase the resolution of an image once it has already been taken. Since the computer sees everything as a mathematical equation, it can only see the number of dots per inch and their hexadecimal codes. If you ask it to add more information (add more pixels), it can only stretch o ut the information it already has. The computer can only make a guess for you and thus the resolution can only be fixed slightly.

If your picture, for some reason, is too dull, bright or blurry, you can use the dodge, burn and sharpen tools to help you out.

Sharpen: The sharpen tool can sharpen parts of an image, but don't expect great results. If you have a blurry picture, sorry, you should just hold the camera still!

Dodge/Burn: The dodge and burn tools affect how light or dark the colours in your image are. If you use the dodge tool over an area the colours become brighter. If you use the burn tool the colours become darker, as if they had become "burnt", thus the name of the tool. Both of these were originally techniques used by manual developpers in the past.

So these are some ways to make your pictures look better using Adobe Photoshop Elements. Similar tools can be found in other photo-editing software so it's always good to know some basics. Now everything can look picture perfect!