What is this thing called Photoshop?

Adobe photoshop is one of the many programs that’s available to help with the editing of photographs. Many digital photographs look great straight out of the camera, especially the point and shoot camera’s like my little Nikon Coolpix s210, the camera sharpens and adds contrast from with in the camera, which most of the time creates a nice sharp vibrant photograph.

The more advanced your camera gets the more adjustments you find you need to make to your photograph before printing. most DSLR camera’s need adjustment to colour and sharpening because they are often not configured to sharpen and adjust with in the camera.

Of course there are many other things that photoshop is used for, its not just for making the simple adjustments mentioned above, but it can be used for touching up portraits-removing blemishes, changing photographs to black and white or sepia, you can even add boarders, text and if you want you can manipulate an image so much it may barley resemble the original photograph taken with your camera.

I use Photoshop Elements  which is aimed at the regular consumer market, it has basic functions and is one of the cheaper versions of the software to buy. Many professionals use Photoshop CS2 which is the full version of Adobe Photoshop and it runs into the hundreds of dollars to buy.

These three self portraits show the difference between a basic edited photograph, a touched up picture using portrait techniques and then a heavily edited photograph.-click to view them larger.