EDITING A PHOTO IS EASY!

Here is a photo that I took from the car on a busy highway near Watertown NY that I thought was cool - HUGE CROWS IN A FIELD!. When the photo hit my computer it was “not so much” cool but had possibilities.

I used my Canon Zoombrowser to crop and edit the photo and the end result was “Gather Worthy”.

Here is what happened between the two photos. I used my Canon Powershot A720IS to take the photos and my Canon Zoombrowser EX to edit the photos.

Zoombrowser is a free download on the Internet. You can find it HERE!

Please note there is information to read before you download. One thing that might be pretty important –

CNET Editor's Note: The Download Now link will take you to the Canon downloads site, where you must choose your camera model and your OS version to download the software.

I'm not sure what OS Version means but I hope someone reading this post does and will help those who want to download this program. (Zoombrowser was free to me with the purchase of my Canon Camera.)

On with my story!

When I move my photos from my camera to my computer they go into  both Zoombrowser AND “my photos”. To find a photo and edit it, the Zoombrowser is easier than “My Photos” (our Microsoft photo place)

Here is what I did:

The above is the original photo - taken from a car (no I was not driving) too far away to get a good shot but I SHOOT ALL MY PHOTOS IN HIGH RESOLUTION so I can crop the crap out of them and end up with a good photo. ( you can see the bigger version above)

When I want to edit it and in this case bring it closer to all of us I crop the photo (TRIM in Canon-Speek) and this is what I decide I want.

Not close enough for me so I do it again to get the crows closer -

and this is what I see - BUT STILL NOT CLOSE ENOUGH!

So I trim it again

And this is what it looks like when I accept the trim. That's close enough - it fits the photo field so now I want to brighten the colors.

I move the Brightness box to the left - experimenting as I go

So I'm happy with the tone of the photo so now I look for better color (saturation) and contrast to make the photo POP!

Now because I believe in ownership and copyright I add some text that indicates this is a photo I took with my camera and with the help of digital intelligence I made it better. It belongs to me! If someone borrows it and posts it to their Facebook or anywhere else on the net - it still belongs to me.

The end result?

Some really cool HUGE CROWS standing in a field off the highway between Watertown NY and Ontario.

I hope you enjoyed this lesson in simple editing - nowhere near PhotoShop difficulty.

Footnote: When I joined Gather 3 years ago I just used HP Image Zone - I had a HP Camera and the program came with the camera but is free on the Internet now. - it does not have or at least mine didn't have a way to add text (copyright) but it did have a magical thing that allowed you to straighten out a photo if you were a bit cock-eyed when you took it. I still use my HP Image Zone to do that if I have a photo that is leaning to one side or the other.

There are several free download editing programs that I hope to share with you in the future.

Have Fun! And Experiment!