Serious image editing can be done with a home computer. Some of the more sophisticated image techniques will require expensive software, but a lot of good image work can be done with simple, inexpensive software.

I am a Windows user, and I normally use Adobe Photo Deluxe 1.0, Adobe PhotoShop 3.0, Irfanview, and occasionally Microsoft Picture It!.  All of these programs, and I suppose most image editing programs, allow you to convert images from one format to another.  So for example, you can start off with a .bmp file, and save it as a .jpg file.

Surprisingly, Adobe's Photo Deluxe has certain features I do not find even in the top packages, such as the truly magnificent PhotoShop (also from Adobe). Photo Deluxe also does a very good job of resizing/repixelating. However, Photo Deluxe does have a nasty bug that occasionally corrupts pixel groups around the edits and even some distance away, so I have to save frequently, with different filenames, to avoid having to retrace my laborious steps when this bug bites. Also, Photo Deluxe can not adjust "gamma" (an absolute necessity!!!), and it does not seem to display properly under Windows 2000. (It's OK under Windows 95, 98 and ME.) But the positive features of this program, and its low cost, have made it my absolute favorite for pixel and area editing.

Adobe's PhotoShop is one of the top graphics programs on the market, and it is not cheap! I am addicted to PhotoShop's "Image-Adjust-Curves" tool. This tool gives me extreme control of the "grayscale" (the general brightness of the image, from black to white). I can fix the usual washed out or underexposed picture without making the picture look "flat", and without losing the highlights in saturation. This tool is a big improvement on standard "Gamma" adjustments.  Gamma is great; "Adjust-Curves" is even better! I also absolutely love the color adjustment tools.  PhotoShop gives me tremendous control over the color spectrum, with separate characteristics at different brightness levels too. These adjustments can really help an oddly colored image. And they can make really well photographed images absolutely scream!!! Adobe has kept these tools in the later PhotoShop releases.

When using PhotoShop, I frequently increase the red, and (to a lesser extent) the green in the mid-shades, using Image-Adjust-Color Balance. This gives warmth without unnatural side effects, if done tastefully. Sometimes I use Image-Adjust-Hue/Saturation, this has tremendous capability to correct odd color problems. Often I select yellow, and move it toward red, and then I select red, and move it toward yellow. (I am not certain that this is the best sequence; it may be better if done in the reverse sequence in many cases.) I sometimes adjust the "lightness" of yellow and red as well, as I move them around in hue. Image-Adjust-Curves and these color tricks have made tremendous improvements in many digitized photos.

Irfanview has gamma adjustment capability, and it easily makes a slideshow out of multiple images in a folder. It also has a selection of image resize/repixelation methods. The most sophisticated of these, the Lanczos, is quite good. I frequently resize underpixelated images with Irfanview, and I am usually very pleased with the lack of jaggies on diagonals and curves. Irfanview allows you to make fine adjustments in .jpg quality from maximum to very low. If you must conserve file size, you can often make .jpg images very compact before they are significantly degraded.

I have found that the gamma adjustment in Irfanview works much better if I first convert the image to a negative, then perform the gamma adjustment, then convert the image back to positive.  I can't see the gamma effect directly while I am adjusting it, so it may be necessary to try this a few times.  Don't save the image under the same name until you are happy with the gamma adjustment, because you may have to reload from disk to try again.  In fact, I recommend that you always save the image with progressive names when making changes.  That way, you can go back if you decide later that you do not like the results of one of the modifications.  You can save all of the intermediate step versions in an archive folder, and just display the final result when you are finished.

This negative-gamma-negative-inspect process is a little inconvenient, but the results are MUCH better, and well worth the extra effort. Note that if you wanted a gamma adjustment corresponding to 2.0 the usual way, you need to set the gamma to 0.5 (that's 1 / 2.0) when making the adjustment to the negative.

Irfanview is available for free on the web.  Search for Irfanview.  And if the author is asking for a contribution, give him something! He deserves it.

Sometimes, PhotoShop and Photo Deluxe can not open or display a perfectly good .jpg or .bmp file for some reason, but I can open almost anything with Irfanview. So when I can't open an image in PhotoShop or Photo Deluxe, I first open the image with Irfanview, and save it in a lossless format (.bmp, .tif, etc), and then open that copy with PhotoShop or Photo Deluxe, and proceed with the edit.

Picture It! has the best red-eye correction I have found. Just point it at the red spot and it does the rest, and it does it well. Picture It! also has powerful sharpening that helps even the most badly focussed images. There is only so much that can be done with bad initial resolution, but Picture It! does the most with the worst of them.

When using several programs to process an image, it is necessary to save the image to pass it to the other programs. When doing this, it is important to use a lossless intermediate image format. Bitmap format works, but tif images are also lossless and much more compact, when LZW compression is used. However, they can be slower to load.  It's a matter of what is important: space, speed, etc. There are other lossless image formats too. For example, Photo Deluxe has a .pdd format that can save all of the layers of an edited image, so you can continue to edit them all later. Use whichever format you prefer, or whichever is writeable and readable by your image processing programs.

When distorting an image, you will lose some resolution. To avoid degradation of the image, resize it first with a high-quality resizing algorithm (such as Lanczos) to enlarge the image. Then the degradation caused by the distortion process will not degrade the overall image quality as much. Why would you care about quality if you "distort" an image? Because you might be compensating for the parallax resulting from the camera angle, or doing a little corrective surgery to enhance a picture, etc.

When processing an image, observe the general qualities of the image. Pay particular attention to the general qualities of imperfection. These qualities are perceived as part of the image, and are ignored by the viewer for the most part - unless they are inconsistent. This inconsistency is the reason that smoothing any part of an image is usually very visible.

You have to be very careful when removing a blemish. Often, it is better to take a copy of a similar section and overlay it on the blemish, and adjust its brightness and color to match it with the surrounding section. The eye is very sensitive to discontinuities in shading, so this can be very tricky! In other cases, you can outline discolored or shadowed sections and adjust their brightness and color slightly, then make a new outline, and adjust its brightness and color slightly, etc. The edges of these outlines will not be visible if the individual adjustments are not overdone. A blemish, eye-bag, etc can be gradually eliminated this way, like a dent in a piece of sheet metal.  Sometimes, though, you will tend to blur the grain this way.

Often the best blending is accomplished by copying a good section of "patch" image (similar to the bad area) onto a different image "layer", and then erasing it with a soft erase stylus around the edges. This makes the correction fade in and take over the center area without any sharp edges. Minor imperfections in the match that would be painfully evident with sharp-edged patching are lost in the general variations of shading.  You can apply color, brightness and contrast adjustment to the patch as well.

Shading can also be corrected by adding spots or streaks to new layers that are configured as brightening or darkening or coloring layers. If I have a picture of someone and they have a typical little bruise or blemish on their skin, I can usually eliminate it completely by opening a new layer, setting it to "lighten", and depositing a small blotch of lighter color to the area of the blemish. By selecting the right "stylus", I can pretty well match the distribution of the darkened area with lightness, and then by adjusting the degree of brightening I can usually cancel the bruise! I can "smudge" the color area around to make it match the darkened area better. The grain of the original image is retained, and the result is very natural, and certainly undetectable by any casual examination when this is properly done!

By using a layer set to "darken" at about 30%, it is possible to do the reverse. I can also freshen or completely change someone's makeup after the fact! It's amazing.

I can alter colors, usually (and ironically) to improve naturalness. I can apply color to the iris of the eye, making gray eyes green, blue, brown, etc. Usually it is best to make the edges of the coloration fade fuzzily away; this looks the most natural. I use a layer set to "darken" or "color" for this, usually around 30% or so. "Color" sometimes requires very high percentage settings to be effective. It is interesting how "darken" will differ in effect from "color" or "none" settings. You have to try it and see.

Photo Deluxe has the "Remove Dust and Scratch" selection, which detects pixels in the selected area that differ by more than a certain amount from the general shade of their surrounding pixels, and re-colors these pixels according to the average shade of pixels within a selectable distance of the discolored pixels. When properly used, this tool can fix many blemishes with a minimal effect on general grain, which can make it a real time saver. In general, the larger the permissible variation in shade, the larger the shade-averaging area should be. The exact settings will depend on the particular characteristics of the image region being modified. Generally, the best setting is a radius of 6 pixels and a depth of 9 color levels, but sometimes the optimum setting is far from this.

---

BACK TO HOME PAGE