If you followed our advice, you’ve shot lots of great vacation-with-the-grandchildren photos. Now, you’ll want to edit them to eliminate any "duds” and winnow out the rest into a coherent story-telling package. Years from now these photos will bring back fond memories of your vacation adventure, and remind you of the clothes, the hairdos, and how young all the grandchildren looked.
Don't touch the delete button
Do not try to edit your vacation photos in the camera by deleting photos you think you don’t need. This goes against almost all the advice on websites and in photo magazines, which suggest deleting excess photos while you’re on your way home from vacation.
But we consulted eight professional photographers for advice on this topic. All eight said don’t start deleting pictures until you can view them on a screen large enough to let you “see” the photo and its nuances. That allows you to view sour facial expressions, eyes open and closed, or a comical series of kids mugging for the camera.
So wait until you’re home to transfer pictures from your camera to your computer (and clear your camera’s memory card) before you start serious editing.
Improve less than perfect shots
As you organize your digital-photo files, you can refine them using editing software that makes them even better. In pre-digital days most of us stored stacks of photos in a shoebox. A computer is a great help in improving, organizing, and storing pictures only if it doesn't simply become your electronic shoebox.
Not every great photo starts out that way. When shooting "on the fly," your exposure may be off a bit, your cropping less than ideal, or your camera tilted at an odd angle as you caught that youngster doing something cute. All those minor glitches are easily remedied with photo software. These programs make it easy to:
- crop your pictures to spotlight the action
- level the horizon line
- reduce high contrast with highlight/shadow control
- correct colors
- change the size and format of a file
Cropping can make a major difference in turning a snapshot into a memorable photograph. PhotoShop, for example, lets you experiment with multiple crops before you decide on the best one to save, without making any changes to the original image should you later change your mind.
Photos shot under less than ideal lighting conditions may result in murky photos where you can barely make out the people you photographed. Unlike film photography, underexposed or overexposed digital images can be "saved" by manipulating shadow/highlight and brightness/contrast controls.
Software recommendations
Dozens and dozens of photo editing software programs beckon for attention. We have narrowed the field to the 10 "most serious" based on opinions from professional photographers who use them, and from published reviews:
Adobe Photoshop Elements, $99
Corel Paint Shop Pro, $79
Ulead PhotoImpact, $89
ACDSee Photo Editor, $49
Serif Photo Plus, $79
Roxio PhotoSuite, $29
FotoFinish Suite, $129
Nova Development's Photo Explosion Deluxe, $49
Google’s Picasa, free
ArcSoft PhotoImpression, $49
Leader of the pack in terms of user satisfaction seems to be Photoshop Elements, with the most bells and whistles of them all, and a friendly interface that helps you every step of the way. You can effortlessly crop, color-correct, lighten and darken parts of a frame, change the shadow/highlight ratio to tone down high-contrast scenes. It even has a "photomerge" feature so that if a grandchild's eyes are closed in the photo you really like, you can "merge" it with a similar photo with eyes open.
Corel Paint Shop Pro is described by users and reviewers as "fun to use" once you take the time to learn it. One-click basic adjustments cut the time it takes to process, edit, enhance, and create professional-quality photos. It is not as easy to navigate as Photoshop Elements.
Ulead Photo Impact is a sophisticated program with what users describe as a "daunting" interface. "Express Fix" is a nifty feature for casual users who simply want a fast and easy tool to clean up and distribute their images. Our pros who use the program say they can guarantee frustration when getting started, but that the program is worth it. There's even a "portrait touch-up" feature that lets you remove bags from under your subject's eyes and whiten their teeth.
Picasa gets attention because it's free, but it isn't currently available for Mac OS. It has a range of intuitive
features, and the price is certainly right. It has simple controls for cropping and leveling pictures.
Before you invest in any photo-editing software, do some homework. Prowl the internet for user-reviews to make sure a program suits your needs, and check with friends who may have some experience with one or more of the programs. You might be dazzled by all the optional effects some of these programs offer, but concentrate on the tasks you routinely do, and how easy it would be to perform them using each program.
When shopping for price, check online sites such as eBay and Amazon. You may find folks who must keep up with the very latest release of a software program and are selling their old one at a bargain price.
Finally, once you've got the photos processed, cropped, color-corrected, and gorgeous, upload them to Grandparents.com's Picture Box. This feature allows you to share your vacation photos with family and friends. Picasa, Flickr, and PhotoBucket all let you stream pictures into Picture Box. And Grandparents.com’s partnership with PhotoWorks offers a seamless way to get prints.
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