After the Fact

Taking photographs is an exercise in capturing fleeting moments onto film or - in today's modern cameras - as a digital file. Sometimes, everything lines up perfectly and blam - you have a masterpiece, ready to enlarge, frame and hang in your living room.

An old-fashioned darkroom

Then, there is reality. There are times when your shots come out underexposed. Or, maybe the colors didn't come out exactly as you wanted them to look. Or, you captured too much in your image, and your shot composition is off. 

Now what?

During the days of shooting on film, there were options you could pursue, and many of those either involved an intricate knowledge of how to manipulate the photo negatives in a dedicated darkroom and an artistic eye. Oh, and a lot of money to get the images developed.

With today's digital cameras, manipulation of the image after the fact is not only easy, but your options are nearly limitless.

The big kahuna of photo manipulation software is Adobe's Photoshop, the industry standard since its introduction in 1988. Not only does the software allow for basic cropping, sharpening of blurry images and color correction; the tools used in Photoshop can be used to create incredible works of art in their own right.

While Photoshop is powerful, it also has a lot of  tools the average photographer may never use. Plus, that heavy price tag ... wow.  Adobe also offers other programs at different price points - such as Photoshop Elements or Lightroom, which offer a more limited, yet still powerful, suite of photo manipulation tools at a much more reasonable price.  

And, if you want a free app to do your photo manipulation, you can always do worse that GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. First released in 1995, this free program tackles many of the same tasks that the more expensive programs handle across all computing platforms.

If you are looking to dip your toe into the world of photo manipulation, this is a great place to start.

Photo manipulation isn't just the realm of desktop computers. There are dozens of free and paid apps for both Android and iPhone platforms which can help you get the best image possible. From familiar apps such as Adobe Lightroom, which can tackle basic image processing to more specialized apps such as Foodie which will make the photos of your gourmet dinner stand out and Visage, which you can use to perfect portrait shots you take of your friends.

The fun part about shooting digital photographs is that you have the ability to manipulate them from the comfort of your own living room. Your full-color digital camera can turn your images into moody black and whites, charcoal or pencil drawings, pastel-toned works of art or hundreds of other looks simply with the click of a button.

You can even select specific colors to bring out from a particular image, such as the eyes on my feline friend here, so they stand out against the black and white.

The ideas are limitless.