3 Easy Steps to Improve Your Digital Photo Experience

The first step to creating beautiful impressive digital photos is of course your camera. If you are serious about your photography, you want a tool that will give you maximum quality to start with.

I was very fortunate to have chosen a Sony Cybershot for my first digital camera. Besides being super easy to use, and providing great quality photos, the essential point is the trimming capability, to be able to zoom in on an image and create a separate close up image.

Many of my wildlife photos look like I was standing right next to the animal, while in fact I was quite some distance away. The Sony Cybershot has 5.0 megapixels with a 10x zoom. I can set the camera to an image size up to 2560 x 1920.

When I first bought my camera, I paid close to $1000.00 for it. In my experience, it was worth every penny. Now you can find this model on Amazon used for $250.00 - $300.00. Sony does not make this camera any more, they have moved on to bigger and better mega pixels and higher zooms.

Check whether your camera has a trimming option, and use it! If you are in the market for a camera upgrade, the main options to look for are mega pixels, zoom, trimming option, and image size choices.

I highly recommend the Sony Cybershot.

Unless you are a professional photographer, in which case you would not be reading this article, chances are you will benefit from editing your digital image. I use Photoshop for editing my photos, but Photoshop can be quite expensive, so unless you already have it, I would reccomend using Picasa for editing your images. With Photoshop you have more control, but Picasa does the same thing, except it is free!

If you are in Photoshop, the first most important step is to adjust your levels. To do this, open your file in Photoshop, on the menu bar go to Image, click to bring up the dropdown menu, and select Levels. Play around with the levels to see how it affects your image. When you are happy with it, save it.

With Picasa, click on the image you want to adjust, and choose the Auto Contrast button. It will automatically adjust the levels. If you are not happy with the results, you can adjust it a bit further using the fill light option.

Here is an example of one of my photos before adjusting the levels, and after they are adjusted:

So many times I see photos that could be great shots, if only the image had been cropped a bit. In Photoshop, you can not only crop your images, you can actually remove unwanted items from your photo, but that is a whole different ballgame, one I will cover in a different Hub.

As far as cropping, look at your image and decide whether it needs to be cropped. Is the subject you are showing the main focus? Is there something that is distracting the eye from the main focus?

Again, I used the bird photo to show an example of cropping. I felt there was too much rock background, so I cropped a little off the right side. Can you see the difference in how the image looks now?

Photography gives us the opportunity to catch life's best moments.

1) Choose a camera that will give you good results to start with. The investment is worth the quality of pictures you will share and cherish.

2) Adjust the levels (or use Auto Contrast in Picasa)

3) Crop your photo! Take out any unnecessary distractions from you photo.

Follow these three steps, and I can guarantee you will see an improvement to your overall photo collection.

One final word about Picasa. I would be lost without my Picasa. As I said before, I have at least 10,000 image files on my computer. Picasa allows me to page through all of my images and find a specific one quickly and easily. Otherwise, I would be opening file after file to see where I put that darn image. This reason alone makes Picasa as valuable as any other tool I use with my photography.

Another two great features of Picasa are the red eye removal tool, and the straighten tool. Give it a try!

I hope this information has been helpful. It is very basic, but important. My next Hub will be a little more advanced, how to use of Photoshop. Discover how to use filters and layers to create fun images like this last photo: