When You Want To Share Your Photographs On The Internet Don’t Just Upload The Whole Lot As They Are! A Little Time And Expertise When Editing Them Can Enhance Your Reputation As A Photographer

On how many occasions have you seen a friend’s photographs uploaded to a website and questioned what made them upload them exactly as they were taken? There’s red-eye making all the people look evil, the main topic of the photo for some reason is confined to one corner and a there’s a collection of blurry images that could be almost anything. It’s one of those really irritating things that I know shouldn’t bug me, but it does!

So when it comes to uploading my own photos for friends to look at, I’m afraid my perspective is totally the opposite. All computers have a standard functionality which will help you to remove parts of the photos or alter the colour and brightness, but over the years I have become an enthusiastic Photoshop fan, so much so that I won’t even upload one photo without at least cropping and resizing it in Photoshop, and taking care that people don’t appear that they require Laser eye surgery to cure their their glaring red eyes.

Those who use the programme daily would probably laugh at my peculiar ways of producing results, but as I am completely self-taught and utilise the program simply as a hobby, I am quite proud of what I can do by way of image manipulation, and in recent months I’ve put together several multi-layer pictures for friend’s birthday greetings, album covers and more, featuring all kind of images – from a personalised saloon bar scene, to an individually tailored bookshelf to a flashy Laser eye light show effect.

But when it comes to doing some straightforward editing before deciding on an album of photos to show others, it’s so very simple to make a few changes and as opposed to uploading a hundred average photos, I’d much rather publish twenty that folk will actually remark on because they really like the image.

So, the first rule for me every time is to remove the red-eye from any people in the image. There’s nothing worse than seeing a really great photo of friends, beautifully posed somewhere pleasant, but each person looks like they are possessed because of the fiery red eyes, which as I said earlier, look like they would need Laser eye surgery to clear up whatever peculiar disease they have! If the photo is a reasonably close-up one, then now is also a good time to erase any nasty skin blemishes – I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve got rid of particularly nasty spots on my skin! You see – the camera really does lie!

Pictures which are affected by dry ice or something like that can usually be improved a lot by altering the levels of the image. Photoshop has a function called Auto Level Adjustment which almost every time will lessen the damage done by dry ice. It’s also easy to amend the levels manually to lighten or darken the picture and alter the effects of a darkened location or an over-enthusiastic camera flash.

Depending on what is behind the subject of the photo, it’s also possible to remove unwanted objects. We’ve all laughed at those snapshots where a perfectly nice image of a friend is spoilt because it looks like they are modelling a lampshade or a plant on their head. A little effort and editing can quite possibly remove the offending object and make the photo look far better. And your buddy will be eternally grateful as they won’t have to put up with all those amusing observations about what they opted to wear on their head for the occasion!

It isn’t always possible to get the subject matter of your photo exactly where you want within an image, most obviously in the case of a moving subject, so if that happens, then crop the photo so that the unwanted areas get deleted. Instead of, for example, the runner who looks like he is trying to vanish out of the corner of the photo, or the fireworks or Laser eye light show appearing only in the top half of the picture, the subject will end up as the main subject of the picture and people who see it will wonder how you got such an great shot.

Naturally, a professional photographer will do an awful lot more with an image before he or she is ready to share it with the world, but for an amateur the few actions above will help your photos look far better than many of your contemporaries photos. And for the most easy of these tasks, there will be software already on your computer which should be able to do the job, without having to pay out for a program such as Photoshop.