Summary: (ATGNI)All The Gear, No Idea. A photographer who has lots of camera equipment but doesn't know what half of it does. A bit of an Uncle Bob, in fact. You may be one of those or NOT. This tutorial will attempt to give you some of the basics for what to do with your photos and how to do basic processing with free software. Whether you use a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_single-lens_reflex_camera" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">(DSLR)</a>digital single-lens reflex camera, Camcorder stills or your Smartphone to capture a photos you might want to edit them at some time. Maybe just change the format, size or correct something. Doing this with simple and easy to use software is not that hard or something to be afraid of. The couple of choices I will discuss work only for Windows, but the basic concepts can work with any software or operating system. Don't let editing your photos intimidate you, lots of features but you probably will not use but about a tenth of them in everyday use. Just have fun! Keep The Elder Divide Ad free! Become a Patron supporter @ <a href="https://www.patreon.com/TheElderDivide" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Patreon.com/TheElderDivide</a> Some digital photo basics you must understand first. Your files on a DSLR, Camcorder or Smartphone are stored in a folder under <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_rule_for_Camera_File_system" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">(DCIM)</a>Digital Camera Images directory or management. This can be on your device local or removable storage. Individual images follow a standard naming structurer you can read about at the DCIM link. You have things like Canvas size or resize, two different things under Image on software menu. Then you have <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_per_inch" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">(DPI)</a>dots per inch, small blocks of colors that build up an image. The higher the better if you want to edit or resize later so images don't look grainy or blurred. Things you might want to do: You don’t necessarily need to apply every step to all of your images. - Rotate to straighten the horizon. - Crop to highlight the important part of the photo. - Fix under/over exposure also contrast. - Convert to black and white (greyscale) if needed. - Repair any damage. - Retouch and/or soften skin tones etc. - Add layers if you want to. - Add text and/or a frame. - Resize to suit. - Batch Convert size, file type or naming with InfraView. and many more but this is the basics... Paint.NET every feature and user interface element was designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable without assistance. Features: - Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface, even handle multiple images easily with tabs that display a live thumbnail of the image instead of a text description. This makes navigation very simple and fast. - Performance, the fastest image editor available no matter what CPU or platform. It starts up quickly and is responsive to every mouse click. - Layers, usually only found on professional software, it forms the basis for a rich image composition. Similar to a stack of transparency slides that form one image. In Paint to do some of the basics start with File>Open>yourfile. - Say you want to crop out an area of the image. On the menu Tools and select Rectangular Select, then place the cross-hairs at start of area to crop out and drag showing dotted area that will be saved, you can reselect if you need to change by just clicking anywhere on image, then do the steps again from cross-hairs. Once you have what you want then Image>Crop to Selection, you should now see only the area you wanted. You have a final chance to change with from menu with Edit>Undo. - To change the size of canvas area say you want to put an image in the center of a larger area or different shape. From menu Image>Canvas Size> you can then select what you want to do for size, position etc.
