How to choose your digital photo editor
software? The essential features
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A photo editor is a software you will use to open an image file (digital photo), to modify it and to save it.
With photo editors, you will be able to modify, enhance, resize,
crop (cut out) your photos and apply an uncountable amount of special effects to them.
These are the most important tasks a digital photo editing software should master:
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Photo enhancement
In the term photo enhancement I include mainly correcting the brightness and contrast of a photo,
correcting color casts, adjusting a sloping horizontal or vertical axis or improving the sharpness of an image.
1. Exposure correction
Nearly all image editors will offer some way of brightness and contrast adjustments.
But they are not all fast and easy.
The levels adjustment combined with gamma correction is by far more comfortable than the classic brightness and contrast adjustment.
The semi-automatic modes of Color Washer are even faster and easier to use since you don't necessarily need the assistance of a histogram.
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Color Washer
corrects color casts, exposure and contrast in the same walk and in a very convenient way.
Excellent results!
PhotoPhilia
offers an automatic levels adjustment (called stretch intensity).
Photo-Brush
offers a very comfortable manual levels adjustment combined with gamma correction as well as an automatic levels adjustment.
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More about this at the page
digital photo enhancement.
2. Color cast correction
Color casts may be inherent to your digital camera,
may come from wrong white balance settings on the camera or bad light while taking the photo.
However it arose, you will want to correct it.
The function you need is RGB adjust or better, white balance compensation.
More about this at the page
digital photo enhancement.
3. Axis correction (horizon)
Did you ever take a photo where the horizon is not horizontal? Of course, we all do!
Then you need to be able to rotate your photo by a small angle.
The rotating function should offer the
antialiasing feature.
Because without antialiasing, the result after rotating your photo by a small angle will be full of ugly steps.
More about this at the page
photo correction.
Photo resizing
Working with digital photos, you will almost always have to resize
-or better resample- your images.
Resampling an image gives much better results than just resizing it.
Read more at
resize photo,
resize jpg and
resize gif.
Format conversion
Among the huge number of available image formats, I would just retain 2 of them, a lossy format the jpeg and a lossless format the png.
Most of us, of course will have to handle some other
-more or less known format- one day.
Therefore it is important to know which format a given software can handle.
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Converting a photo or an image from one file format to another one is mostly a thing of opening an image file and saving it subsequently.
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Read the page about
converting images
or consult our
table of image file formats to know which software is able to handle them.
Photo compression, Jpeg compression
The ability to save images in a compressed format and especially to compress JPEG images is a
must
for any digital photo editing software.
Compressing a JPEG image file will make the file smaller without changing the width and the height of your photo.
This is very important if you publish photos on the web.
More on this at the pages dealing with
photo compression
and
jpeg compression.
Keeping the EXIF info
Most digital cameras, when saving the photos in the JPEG file format, will save EXIF info in the JPEG file.
The EXIF info contains information like the shutter speed, the aperture, the focal length etc...
With most graphic editors or photo editors, the EXIF info will be lost when you save the modified image.
Only a few digital photo editors and viewers are able to keep the EXIF info when saving an image on disk.
More about keeping the exif info at the page about
exif viewers.
Special effects
Special filters and effects are not only a nice toy for those who like to play and experiment,
they might sometimes be very usefull for the "serious" user too.
Some photo editors offer only a few of them,
while some others offer a huge list that may even be expandable if the software accepts photoshop plug-ins.
More on this at the page dealing with
special effects.
The following are not functions or effects to apply to your photos, but points that make photo editors more comfortable to the user.
The size of your photo in pixels
Whatever you intend to do with your photos, you need to know the width and height in pixels.
That's why a good photo editing software should always tell you the size of the image you are working on.
To be convenient, the size in pixels should be visible in the status bar (at bottom of the window) or even in the title bar of the window.
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Digital photos are raster images.
They are made of a large amount of pixels -single colored dots- that are juxtaposed to fill up the surface of an image.
- To use a digital photo as a desktop wallpaper you will need a photo of -may be- 1024 pixels (width) x 768 pixels (height).
- To insert a photo into a web page, you will need an image of -let's say- 400 x 300 or 300 x 240 pixels.
Hence it's important to know the size (width and height) of your photos.
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The zoom factor
When you open an image file with a digital photo editor, most of them will let you zoom in or zoom out the picture.
The zoom factor tells you if what you see on your display is one to one,
the photo at its real size or bigger than real (zoomed in) or smaller than real (zoomed out).
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Zooming in or zooming out will not change the size or the content of your image file.
It will only change what you see on your screen.
To really modify the size of the image file, you would need to resize it.
Read more about this at the resize image page.
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To zoom what you see on your screen, most digital photo editors offer one of these possibilities:
- either you have 2 buttons with a magnifying glass, one with a plus sign and one with minus sign.
Click on these buttons and the open image will instantly zoom in or out.
- or you have only one button with a magnifying glass. Just click on it.
Then move over the image and click with your left mouse button to zoom in and with your right mouse button to zoom out.
Zooming in is very convenient when you work on small details. But knowing what you are seeing on your display is important.
User friendly image editors show the zoom factor either as a percentage (100%, 200%,...) or as a fraction (1:1, 2:1,...)
in the title bar of any open image.
Browsing through folders with thumbnails
You want to open an image to work on it with your digital photo editor.
There are tens of files
-may be over one hundred- in the same folder.
All these file names look very similar and you don't know which one is THE one you want to work on.
But if you can see all the images in the folder at once like a small post stamp each, then you will find THE photo you need, quickly.
That's why convenient digital photo editors give you the possibility to browse through a folder and to see all the files as thumbnails.
Some will have a menu
file->browse,
I did even see some of them that show up the browser when you click the menu
file->open
or the
Open File button.
Browsing through folders with thumbnails is the main function of image viewers,
but is present as an accessory in most good digital photo editing software too.
Consult our
table of essential features of photo editor software
to know which software offers them.
