Net Better. net

First, do not edit your original. Save your original image in a safe place - it’s best to back it up to CD or DVD so if your computer’s hard drive crashes you won’t lose it - then make a duplicate of the original. While you’re at it, give it a name that is meaningful to you. Work on your image and save it in a lossless file format such as TIF/TIFF or BMP or PSD (Photoshop) or PSP (JASC Paint Shop Pro). Don’t save, edit and resave your image in a JPG/JPEG format because image data will be lost due to compression.  JPG/JPEG files are smaller computer files and take up less space on your hard drive and digital camera’s memory card than other file formats, because JPG/JPEG compression throws away image data that its algorithm considers redundant.

For example, say you took a picture of a manta ray at the Flower Gardens in August 2004 - everybody’s got a Flower Gardens manta ray, right? - and your digital camera gives you an image file called P1010031.JPG. Start your imaging software and open P1010031.JPG, then under the File menu, select Save As..., select a lossless file format (TIF/TIFF or BMP or...), and name the file something like, "MantaRayFlowerGardens8-04.TIF". Then start editing "MantaRayFlowerGardens8-04.TIF" and you can save it to your hard drive as often as you like while you work.
 

The Levels – Histogram tool in Photoshop is an exposure adjustment tool, to adjust the range of brightness from blackest black to the whitest white – shadows, midtones and highlights. I checked information on a few other popular image editing programs, and several others besides Photoshop should have a Levels or Histogram tool.
 

The Curves tool allows you to fine tune brightness levels. Well, it doesn’t look like Elements, Paint Shop Pro or Picture It! has this tool. But you should be able to find some way to accomplish the same thing if you are running something besides Photoshop. Maybe you might be able to tweak your software’s Levels/Histogram or other exposure correction tool.
 

The Color Balance tool lets you tweak the colors and hues. For example, you might need to turn down the blue of the ocean a little and bring out some other colors in the photo subject, like a fish or a coral head.
 

Hue/Saturation is another color correction tool. You should find color and hue/saturation tools in imaging software other than Photoshop.
 

Crop and resize. If you have a computer with a fair amount of horsepower – a fast processor, a decent amount of memory and unused disk space – then the best thing to do is perform these basic editing steps on your full-size image. Then save it – this is your full-size edited image. Then resize and/or crop it for how you intend to use it.

Say you have a 6.2 megapixel camera that gives you an image that’s 2,832 by 2,138 pixels, and you want to send it to friends in e-mail. Some of the most common computer screen sizes are 800 by 600 pixels, or 1,024 by 768, or 1,280 by 1,024 pixels. So the full-size image (2,832 by 2,138) is way too big to display on a computer screen. You should use your imaging software to resize it to less than 800 by 600 to be sure it will fit most computer screens.

If your computer is kind of old and the hard drive is nearly full, and your full-size image is large and your imaging software is awfully slow when you are working on the image, then you may want to resize the image (make it smaller) and crop it first, and then apply the editing steps above. That might make editing faster. But you don’t get an edited full-size version, and your hard drive will continue to fill up. To get faster performanace, one solution is to delete old, unused stuff from your hard drive, and defragment your hard drive (see Help on your computer for instructions on how to defragment a hard drive). Other solutions include adding another hard drive or more memory. Or you might buy a new computer (gasp!) and dedicate it for image editing.
 

Sharpen. Sharpening the image should be last, after resizing. The best built-in sharpening tool in Photoshop is the Unsharp Mask tool. Now save it again to a new file name. Don’t save it to the same file name, because that will write over your full-size edited image. If you do that then you won’t be able to go back to it and resize it for other applications.

For example, say you saved your original manta picture to a file named "MantaRayFlowerGardens8-04.TIF" at 2,832 by 2,138 pixels, then you edited it to your liking, resized it to 700 by 528 pixels to send in e-mail, and then sharpened it. Now, if you simply save it again, you have lost (overwritten) your edited 2,832 by 2,138-pixel image, and "MantaRayFlowerGardens8-04.TIF" is now only 700 by 528 pixels. If you want to make, say, an 8 by 10-inch print later, sorry - 700 by 528 is not enough pixels for a nice print. You’ll have to go find your original 2,832 by 2,138-pixel file - what was it called again, P1010031.JPG? and where did you save it? - edit it again, and then resize it to an 8 by 10-inch print size.

Instead, once you have edited the 2,832 by 2,138-pixel "MantaRayFlowerGardens8-04.TIF" the way you want, save it - you might save it as "MantaRayFlowerGardens8-04-2832x2138.TIF". Then after resizing it to 700 by 528 pixels for e-mail and sharpening it, save it to new file name, such as "MantaRayFlowerGardens8-04-700x528.TIF". This way you have your full-size edited image and the smaller image saved, and you can go back to the full-size image to do something else with it if you want to. Actually in this scenario - making an image for e-mail or posting on the Internet - you should the final image in a JPG/JPEG format, but only after you have finished all editing. JPG/JPEG images are smaller due to compression, e.g., 80 KB rather than 700 KB, and are easier to transmit on the Internet.

With respect to making prints (on paper), for best print quality you want as close to 300 pixels per inch (ppi) as you can get - you don’t need more than 300 ppi. For an 8 by 10-inch print ideally you want 3,000 by 2,400 pixels (300 ppi multiplied by 10 inches = 3,000 pixels, and 300 ppi multiplied by 8 inches = 2,400 pixels). But in the example above, with 2,832 by 2,138 pixels that isn’t possible. You need to use about 267 pixels per inch (2,138 pixels divided by 8 inches = 267 pixels per inch).