Photos - 102 Using Photo Editing Programs

You have your best shot in front of you on the screen, although it might be a bit dark, or a bit crooked, or a bit small, with gobs of useless contraptions merely taking up space in an otherwise perfect photo of your subject. Now what?

Open your photo editing program. This can be any number of editors, they come bundled with any graphical mechanism you can imagine(your printer, your scanner, your iphone!, your computer? ha!, your camera too, yep, even the newer batman rings), there are so many in fact, I wouldn't care to even try making a list of the many photo editing programs in circulation.

Now, open your "perfect photo". If I've taken 3 shots, and determined one to be the best, I'll copy and paste it to a new folder I've titled "edit", saving the original, unaltered, in the main folder.

Now you'll find options within your editing program for "rotate and crop", "enhance", "resize", etc. If you give a flip about your viewing audience, and I'm sure at least a few of you do, use these to make your photo most presentable.

Rotating: isn't so difficult, simply choose numbers + or - (which = left or right), until the top is straight up.
Cropping: is very useful in getting the dog out of the picture of your "untarnished" silver, etc. (crop merely means to cut off the unwanted portions)
Enhance: will usually bring a dark, or over exposed, photo, back into clarity. If not, use the "lightening", or "contrast" to get it most easily viewable.
Resize: is actually one of the most important, yet most unused and misunderstood ones of the bunch. It will make your photo more readily viewable on more screens, but harder to duplicate(with very much success), while at the same time making it clearer and easier to see for most anyone on the internet.
To use resizing, start first with the pixels setting, use either a 72, or a 96 pixels per inch(both readily fit most of today's computer screens very easily). Then, after choosing one of those, choose the width[if using 72 ppi, use 720, if you chose 96 ppi(a bit higher resolution setting), use a 960 width]

Each of these processes might ask if you wish to save the changes, simply click yes as they do.

And lastly, after resizing a photo, and going to close it, when it asks to save, and you've clicked "yes", it will then give you an option to choose at what level of quality you want it saved to, the lower numbers to a lower resolution(and file size), the higher level of quality to a higher resolution(and file size). At this point I choose a number totaling under 100k in most internet posting situations, which inhibits theft of your photo, while still allowing a clear view.

Also, when you go to save it, there's options to save as, such as jpg, png, etc, which will convert the edited photo into whichever format you want, but, it will also alter the file size, and may need to be resized again after changing the format(best to change it prior to editing)