Photo edit software and services
Photographs
are an important part of your family history project. Digital copies of faded,
damaged, and poorly composed photos can be improved with a photo editing
program or on-line service.
Software
The
professional standard is Adobe Photoshop CS5,
which is a bit
pricey ($699) and requires training to use. For those who are serious about
learning a similarly complex program but are put off by the cost of Photoshop CS3,
there’s Gimp . It’s free and the gimp
organization has free tutorials as well. These programs are ideal for photo
restoration and you can work and save in a large variety of formats, including PSD.
Adobe’s Photoshop Elements has some of the great features of Photoshop CS4, but is easier to use and more
affordable (about $100 if you shop around). Comparable programs in that same price range are Corel PaintShopPro and Corel PhotoImpact. PhotoImpact is the
cheapest of the three and has added bonus features—rule of thirds and golden mean tools for
cropping. Any of these are a good investment if you want to do things like
repair damaged photo as well as basic editing functions, and they work
in several formats, including PSD.
If
all you want to do are the basics (crop, resize, lighten, darken, remove red
eye, some color correction) and work in JPEG only, go with one of the free
photo editing programs like Google’s Picasa. Or check to see
if your computer came bundled with a photo editing program. There are a number
of low price photo editing programs, but they aren’t any better than the free
ones, so don’t waste your money.
Services
Just
want to fix your photos up a bit and share them online? Try a photo editing
service like Picnik. It’s free and you can upload directly to photo sharing websites like Webshots or Flickr. Photo sharing on
these sites is also free. They make money through their printing service.
Another option is Shutterfly Upload your
photos, edit, and share for free. Shutterfly and Flickr will combine your
photos and text in a bound book for a fee. Great project idea for your family
history.
More photo edit
