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CyberLink's Top 10 Photo Editing Tips & Tricks
Digital photography is doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive to be rewarding and fun. So keep your camera at the ready for when you spend time with friends, go on adventures or just want to capture a moment. CyberLink helps you enrich your photography with easy-to-use tools to manage, enhance and share photos. Have a look at our favorite tips and enjoy taking pictures!
2. Send them home with a terrific picture
3. Upgrade your camera’s lens - with software
4. Share the year’s highlights in a slideshow
5. Don’t delete that photo!
6. Get creative
7. Banish unseasonal bits from photos
8. Perfect Color Tones
9. Manage all Your Photos
10. Crop for Success
1. Make your friends and family look their best
They say the camera doesn’t lie. Still, it’s nice to be able to show our best side. The good news is that modern image editing software now includes easy-to-use tools for stunning digital makeovers. With portraits and group shots, editing software can help brighten a smile, smooth skin or shed a few pounds. A little bit goes a long ways! It doesn’t take too long and your friends will thank you.
PhotoDirector 4’s People Beautifier tools include Tooth Brush, Eye Blinger, Skin Smoother, Wrinkle Remover and Body Shaper. Each tool has an eraser brush to make the effect easy to fine tune.
2. Send them home with a terrific picture
Holiday entertaining is a big part of the season and it’s always nice to reward your guests with memorable photos of your time together. Be sure to take plenty of shots when your friends are over and spend a few moments fixing up the best ones after the visit. When you post your photos on Facebook, remember to tag your friends so they are notified to have a look.
PhotoDirector 4 includes easy ways to compare similar shots to choose the best one. Log into Facebook directly from within PhotoDirector 4 for instant sharing.
3. Upgrade your camera’s lens - with software
Lens correction helps make up for flaws found in nearly every photo. Imperfections include vignetting or darkening near the corners of the frame, straight lines appearing curved due to barrel or pincushion distortion and color fringes around edge detail from chromatic distortion. Even though these problems don’t always jump out of the original photo, you can almost always see the difference when you make the corrections.
PhotoDirector 4 lets you correct barrel distortion, perspective distortion, chromatic distortion and vignetting effects all in one place in the Adjustment panel under Correction.
4. Share the year’s highlights in a slideshow
Slideshows are a wonderful way to share with friends during the holiday season. With the popularity of Smartphones and tablets, you can take slideshows along with you anywhere! Adding pan and zoom to slideshows makes them feel dynamic, as does music. It’s fun to create a soundtrack from something on your current playlist. Include a title slide at the beginning of the slideshow to let everybody know the people or event that you are sharing.
PhotoDirector 4 slideshows lets you turn your pictures into amazing HD slideshow videos with background music and automatic pan and zoom. Save as a video file or upload directly to YouTube.
5. Don’t delete that photo!
There’s often a way to make a poor shot better. Almost every photo captures some special moment or memory, even the worst of your shots. Today’s software for fixing basic photo problems like lighting and color balance are powerful and easy to use. Plus, removing unwanted elements and fixing up portraits is well within reach. Many modern image editors are also non-destructive so you don’t need to worry about damaging your original photos. The Undo key is also good for experimenting! So don’t send that photo to the circular file. You’ll be amazed at the keepers you can create.
PhotoDirector 4 lets you apply effects to entire photos or just parts. Use adjustment brushes to apply corrections to just the parts of the photo you want to fix.
6. Get creative
Every once and in a while, it’s great to spend some time exploring the creative side of image editing. Take ordinary photos and turn them into eye catching works of art with filters, special effects, compositing tools, frames, titles and bling highlights - just to name a few. Whether your artistic eye tends toward Andy Warhol-style pop art, HDR wizardry or beyond, give yourself the chance to try something new and have some fun. After you’ve created your masterpiece, show it to the world! Use it on a Christmas card or add it as your Facebook cover image. Put it on your desktop! An amazing image is fun to use and share.
PhotoDirector 4 includes dozens of presets for exploring creative effects. Download even more from DirectorZone!
7. Banish unseasonal bits from photos
Sometimes you wind up with things in your photos that you just don’t want there: power lines, objects or even people you’d rather not see. Fortunately, simple and easy ways to remove unwanted objects from photos are found in affordable editing packages. You’ll be amazed what you can do in less than 5 minutes! When removing objects from the foreground, keep an eye on the background to make sure that nothing gets stretched out of place. Have fun!
PhotoDirector 4 has two tools to remove unwanted objects from photos: Content-Aware Removal and Smart Patch. Both are located in the Edit panel under Object Removal.
8. Perfect color tones
Achieve the right color balance for indoor and outdoor scenes. If you are shooting indoors and there’s enough light, try turning the flash off to get more natural lighting and color. Shoot near the windows to take advantage of available natural light! For outdoor scenes, stand with the sun at your back so your subject is facing the source of light. Correct color casts after you shoot by adjusting the White Balance in your editing software.
PhotoDirector 4 includes White Balance and Tone controls in the Global Adjustment Tools.
9. Manage all your photos
When taking pictures of people, it can be tough to get that one ideal pose. Don’t worry. Snap away and review the pictures afterwards on your PC to find just the right shot when everyone is in the best spirits – and have their eyes open! When you bring your photos into your computer, use tagging, face recognition, rating and custom albums to sort and organize your pictures. Techniques for comparing photos such as side-by-side display make it easy to view different shots to find the best one.
PhotoDirector 4 Smart Collections automatically organize your photos for easy browsing. Create your own collections using custom rules.
10. Crop for success
When taking holiday photos, try using the Rule of Thirds to position your subjects. Imagine two horizontal lines and two vertical lines dividing the frame into nine equal parts and place your subject at any of the intersections. Using your photo editing software, try cropping your photos based on other compositional guidelines such as diagonal, isosceles or triangle! You’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results.
PhotoDirector 4 crop tools are non-destructive so you can change cropping anytime.
