Images – Editing paid and free

For those who are not ready to go all out purchasing Image editing software, there are plenty of quality options available. Adobe have Adobe Photoshop Express. This is a great application from the makers of the industry leading program Photoshop. It is a great way to experience the power of their parent products and decide whether it suits your needs. Once you use it for a while you will have an insight that will enable you to decide if you need more. It is also a way to compare its power to other available applications.

In this image beside I snipped doing a Google search you can also see some of the other often searched for image editing applications.

There are many, but as you will quickly find,

•  some are pretty basic on what you can do
• some quickly start prompting you to move up to their paid version
• some are extremely powerful but you need a pilots licence to drive them.
• some are missing the most basic tools
• some are great but quality suffers with extensive editing
• some want to reinvent the wheel with interfaces that are not intuitive

Something you will notice is the best tend to be close copies of the benchmark Photoshop user interface. Why? because it works and people can use previous knowledge in other similar programs to find things easier.

I have to warn you, Image editing and manipulation can become addictive. It tends to stimulate your creative streak.
Especially when it can also rescue those photos you took that never turned out right.

You know the ones you cried over because the moment will never be repeated and give you a second chance to capture it.

The ones that were almost black and under exposed when you viewed them later.

The ones that were almost white and drastically overexposed so there was almost no color left?

Well if you kept them, dig them out and have a play, you will be amazed.

Image Raw format

RAW is a file format that captures all image data recorded by the sensor when you take a photo. Because no information is compressed with RAW you’re able to produce higher quality images, as well as correct problem images that would be unrecoverable if shot in the JPEG format.

The information within the original shot often contains all the color and definition, just the human eye cannot see it. To the eye it appears all white, or all black. Well the data does not see a single shade of black or a single shade of white where our eye did. It actually sees dozens of shades of those colors. It also picks up the few coloured Red, Green and Blue pixels that were there but our eye could not see. And because of that it can separate, stretch contrast and tone them in post processing.
A quick correction with one of these programs can often reveal that special moment is still there.

Save your Images, even the broken ones.

So the lesson here is never throw anything away it may be saveable in post-processing.

They say an picture tells a thousand words, well that is not quite true. A picture actually saves a thousand words.

We all see images a little differently because our brains and internal thought patterns give higher or lower preferences to certain visual aspects.

We often struggle to describe a picture in exactly the same way to another person. We try to say the same things in multiple different ways in an effort to make it real for our recipient and their way of seeing things.

We are a very visual race. Keep that in mind when preparing posts or content for your website.

People do like to hear your words, they like to know how you think, see if you have something in common.

But make the experience valuable by including well thought out visuals and graphics.

A thoughtfully chosen image invokes  strong emotion. The kind of emotion is of  lesser or secondary concern.

Having invoked the emotion you now have the readers attention and they are consciously thinking about the topic.

They have a degree of care, now you have the opportunity to tell them the story of your post.

So chose your images wisely, make them relevant, then people are more likely to read your words.

The addition of more images through the main body of the article or post should depict the things you are describing.

The images generate authority in your words.  Graphic evidence if you like to use the term.

I will go deeper into optimizing images in the following posts. Compressing all my beautiful images     

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