Digital Photography - Editing Images

Michael Stewart: Hi! I am Michael Stewart. I am professional photographer here showing you simple digital photography. Now I am going to show you how to edit your images in an application like Photoshop. Let's look at a few of the more common image editing procedures. I am going to start with cropping. We have here an image, this is from a Compaq camera and it's in a 2:3 aspect ratio. Now we are going to crop it to a 4X6. Now we have it in a 4X6 aspect ratio. Now this is great. We can order 4X6 print, it will look just like this, but what if we want to order an 8X10 of that as well? A printing service is going to crop off the top and bottom to make it an 8X10 aspect ratio. This is going to chop off this little boy's head. Now some printing services allow you to move this crop up or down and that's one way to solve the problem. The other is to leave a little more room, when you crop. We will watch for this aspect ratio.

Let's look at the basics of sizing an image for a output. Pixel dimensions are very useful for a screen resolution. If we want to look at the image just on a monitor or e-mail it to somebody, then we are going to look at the width and the height of the pixels. You probably want something fairly small, 600X450 would be a normal size image for the web. In our image editing program, if we set it to a 100%, then that's what size it's going to be on a monitor of the same resolution. Now if we look at sizing an image for a print, then we are going look at the width and the height and the resolution in pixels per inch, that's PPI. You very often hear this called DPI but what the people really mean is PPI. Dots are really for printers, pixels are for digital images. Now I have here a 180 PPI set at 11 inch X 15 inch. Now 11X15 print and it will be nice as a smaller size. So let's resize this because we don't really need a 11X15 on this. All we need is a 4X6. So let's set the longest dimension to 6 and a 180 PPI. This will make a much smaller file for us to upload to our printing service.

Now once we have it sized the way we want, we need to save it out as a file that would be appropriate to upload to our service. What I am going to do is I am going to save this as a JPG. Here in my JPEG Options, I will turn the Quality level down to 10. That will make a slightly smaller file for my upload without loosing much quality to 190.

0 K. That is a good size file to make a 4X6. So that is how you edit your images and get them ready. Next we are going to talk about sharing those images.