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How to Touch Up Photos with FotoFinish
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Even the best photographers take pictures that don't quite turn out as expected.
Some photos can be a little too dark while other may seem washed out or badly framed.
With FotoFinish, you'll have all the tools you need to quickly transform
your photo from an image slated for the trash to one proudly shared with
friends and family.
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Touch up and
improve
your photos |
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| Before You Start Editing: 11 Photo Retouching Tips |
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1) Always save the original copy of your image in a safe place. This will be your
digital negative. If you make a mistake while editing you can always start over with the original.
2) Save your edited image regularly to avoid losing your work if your computer crashes in
the middle of the editing process.
3) When you download photos from your digital camera, their names are often nothing more than a series of cryptic numbers.
To make your photos easier to find and identify later, save them using descriptive names. For example:
Grandma_Christmas_2002.jpg
4) To group similar images together, make the first word
in their name the same. Then when you open an album, the similar photos will
be grouped together alphabetically. For example, the files
Grandma_Christmas_2002.jpg and Grandma_Baking_Pie.jpg will be placed next to
each other. However if you had named the two files: Christmas_Grandma.jpg
and Pie_Grandma.jpg the images would be separated and harder to find.
5) You may find it convenient to archive your original photos chronologically.
One easy way is to make a folder on your computer for each year, and inside that create twelve
subfolders, one for each month. Place your original images in these folders as you take them,
and later you can quickly find images from any given time period.
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6) Most web browsers support only three file formats: GIF, JPEG, and PNG.
So if you want to publish something to the web, you'll need to save your photo in one of
these formats.
7) If you're working with a series of images from one camera
or scanner, they might need the same type of adjustments in brightness, contrast,
and saturation. You can save yourself some time by writing down the values and
settings for the first image and applying these to all the images that follow.
8) When you share your pictures with others, it's important to reduce file size -
no one should have to wait hours to download your photos. It's also important to reduce the
dimensions of your photographs so others can view them easily. Most computer monitors are still set to
800 x 600. To allow most people to view your images without scrolling, you need to
reduce the size of your photo to 800 x 600 or less. By reducing the
dimensions of your photo, you will also reduce the file size considerably making your images
quicker to download.
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9) As you are saving your photographs,
keep in mind that every time you save an image as a JPEG it will lose some
data even if you use the Fine setting. It's best to keep your images in a
lossless file format like PNG while editing them, and only save to the
JPEG format (a "lossy" file format) once you are done. In general, avoid multiple saves using a
lossy compression like JPEG.
10) Sometimes you'll want to save several copies of an image.
When you prepare an image for printing, you want a high-quality image with high resolution.
However, when you publish that same image to the web, you need to reduce it in size and compress it.
You'll often want to keep three separate versions of a favorite image: the unretouched original, one version
for printing, and one version for e-mailing or publishing to the web.
11) Add a watermark to your images to protect them from digital thieves. This watermark can be as simple
as writing your name, your company's name, and a copyright symbol somewhere on the image or you can create and add your own logo to
your images.
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Protect your
image with
a copyright
notice or
watermark
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