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Photo retouching normally means "amending" or "modifying." Before
digital photography, retouching could only be done by select professionals. They would shine controlled
light on photos in darkrooms, or use retouching pens to erase marks and scratches.
The advent of digital photography, however, means that anyone with a personal computer and a graphics editing program
can make their photographic prints look more beautiful than ever. Photo Retouch allows adjusting not only such basic elements
as brightness, contrast, and color, but also enables the use of graphics editors to make your photos come out the way you
want, by fixing problems with camera settings that cannot be entirely resolved solely through automatic adjustments. |
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Broadly speaking, retouching
includes design work, such as making photographs seem like illustrations, or creating composite photographs.
To persons who want to make prints of their digital photos at
home, however, photo retouching can be taken to mean "a standard
part of creating good-looking prints".
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Which
brings us to the question of discussing just what a graphics editor program is, and how can it
be used for photo retouching? Graphics editors fall into two main categories: drawing programs,
in which users make line drawings onscreen, and painting programs, which are used similarly to
painting with brushes. High-end versions of the latter type are used in photo editing.
In this section, we provide a thorough treatment of photo retouching using Adobe Photoshop, the global standard in
graphics editing for photographers and graphic designers alike. |
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| Adobe Photoshop for retouching |
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Here, we used Adobe Photoshop to
describe standard retouching techniques. However, other programs with similar sets of features
can also be used.
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Retouching may sound like a complicated concept. There are ways
of changing a photo with just a single mouse click, however, that can make it the result seem like a completely
different piece of work. Retouching has a low entry barrier, and can be as sophisticated as you want. |
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You'll get a sense of the joy of learning to retouch
photos the first time you hold a clean, sharp photo print. |
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