Manipulating Images Successfully
Thanks to the latest scanners and digital cameras, it's almost inevitable that those bad pictures will be posted on the World Wide Web for the entire world to gawk at.
Digital photo software gives those bad pictures a second chance. Using your PC, you can get rid of that red eye, crop out Aunt Ruth's bunny slipper, image resize or even put your middle-aged face on your (or someone else's) slim teen-aged torso. It doesn't take a degree in graphic arts.
Armed with my digital and conventional cameras, a flatbed scanner and absolutely no sense of composition, I set out to turn lead into gold with a couple of the latest photo editing programs.
With these products, reality is no longer the limiting factor in getting a good picture. But if you want to pull off really stunning effects, you'll need to invest in extra memory, and have plenty of hard disk space to hold those images while you work your magic.
If you own a digital camera, scanner or color printer, you probably got a basic image editing program in the package. One of the most common is Adobe's PhotoDeluxe, which came bundled with the Epson Stylus 600 color printer I recently bought.
You'll also find a variety of shareware image editing programs on the Internet, the most popular being Paint Shop Pro. The feature sets of all these packages can vary widely.
At the top of the heap is Adobe's PhotoShop 5.0, a favorite of professional graphic artists and photographers for its superb control and fantastic effects. In fact, the odds are good that any photo you see in this newspaper was processed with PhotoShop. As you would expect, PhotoShop has a steeper learning curve than bundled software packages - and at $ 649, it's definitely not free. But simplified sets of PhotoShop tools are included or can be added into the generic PhotoDeluxe, as well as two new enhanced versions - PhotoDeluxe Home Edition 3.0 for home use and PhotoDeluxe Business Edition for the office.
Fortunately for those of us with limited software budgets, Adobe has included a good selection of basic PhotoShop functions in the PhotoDeluxe line. Microsoft has begun to make its foray into the image editing market as well. While Windows has included basic image editing software for years (Windows Paint), Microsoft went full-force into the market last year when it acquired Image Composer, a package that combines the basic elements of PhotoShop with rudimentary versions of the drawing and text formatting features you'll find in high-end illustration packages such as Adobe Illustrator or Freehand.
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