You’ve probably heard the terms before, and perhaps you’ve never even stopped to consider that in fact they don’t mean the same thing. There are similarities, of course, but the tools used for retouching require quite a bit more effort than the basic features that will be needed for editing, and while it’s probably not the most important information to store in your brain it’ll be handy to know when it comes to searching the internet for the necessary software for the job.
What Is Photo Editing?
For the most part, photo editing is the basics – though in truth some software will bundle everything under this one umbrella term. Editing is taking a base photo and applying certain enhancements to it to alter the overall look or quality of the picture. Mostly this means adjusting elements like lighting and exposure, contrast, color temperature and the RGB levels. Often it’ll also mean cropping and rotating a picture to remove unwanted elements, better position the perspective or give the image a better subject focus.
Many professional photographers will also include a process termed ‘culling’ into the aspect of editing, in which they will delete photos that are deemed unworthy of sharing. This likely means the subject’s eyes are closed, have been captured in an unfortunate pose or are simple test shots to get the correct settings from the camera; in these cases the images are being ‘edited’ since they are examined and thrown to the trash. It’s a process you, too, will probably go through if creating your own photo book.
Luckily, since photo editing mostly requires basic tools, the majority of such software will have these features included. Sometimes they may be missing fairly obvious options – such as cropping – but for the most part you won’t need to try too hard to find a program that helps you edit images.
What Is Photo Retouching?
Retouching is a little more specific since it involves removing specific flaws within a photograph. At a basic level this means removing red-eye caused by a camera’s flash, softening someone’s skin to make it appear smoother and wrinkle-free or even repairing flaws with the quality of the image itself – such as removing grain from a darker picture. But there are more complex and intensive tasks involved with this, too, such as removing (or cloning) objects from a photo completely, shrinking to reduce the look of someone’s weight or bringing in aspects from one photo over to another.
The tools for these are often a little more specialized, and can come in a number of names and terms. Cloning is the most common tool for retouching since it allows the painting over of defects while still maintaining contextual sense within the image, while blending (or smoothing, or blurring) is typically used on photos of faces. Some programs even allow the selection of an item to be removed and have the software process its extinction automatically.
As you might expect, since these tools are a little more complex not all editing suites provide this sort of functionality. Not only that, but some are better than others at achieving believable results. Professional software that needs to be installed – such as Xara Photo & Graphic Designer – is practically guaranteed to include these features, but that doesn’t mean that online editing software doesn’t also offer these tools. Fotor, for example, provides a large number of beautification tools to allow for more than simple editing.
Best Photo Editing Software of 2024
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More FAQs
- Why Is Photoshop so Expensive?
- What’s The Difference Between Photo Editing and Retouching?
- What Is Online Photo Editing?
- Should I Edit My Photos?
- Is Photo Editing Cheating and Ethically OK?
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