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Photo Tips & Techniques

If you are anything like me, you have a box in your house in some attic or closet filled with pictures that almost perfectly captured a moment of your life.  I say ‘almost’ because some of the photographs are too dark or too light, in one of them your skin is a little green, your grandfather has red-eye or there is a glare on your sister’s glasses. 

If you are even more like me, you either have been meaning to learn a photo-editing program such as Photoshop, or you know enough to do some editing but do not have the patience or skill to perfect your images.  Luckily, there are experts for this. 

For those who do not relish editing their own images, a company called DigitalCustom, www.digitalcustom.com, offers to do it for you.  DigitalCustom provides digital editing and illustration services over the web at www.image-edit.com and through retailers in the U.S., Japan, Europe and Australia (ask your local photography retailer).  These services are not automated but are custom jobs completed by professional artists.  According to Jeffrey Makoff, president of DigitalCustom, “the photograph is only the starting place.”
 
Some of the services DigitalCustom offers include adding text onto your image (“Smith Family Reunion 1999”), correcting color, lightening or darkening an area, removing unwanted people (your daughter’s ex-boyfriend) or things (a branch that is seemingly growing out of your uncle’s head), adding a motion effect, and correcting red-eye.  DigitalCustom can also provide premium services such as photo restoration for those photographs handed down from generation to generation, digital hand coloring, Hollywood glamorizing (they can take a snapshot portrait and make it look like a glamour shot), and photo illustration or cartoons.  A photograph can even be edited to look like an original watercolor, oil or pastel illustration.

Many of the images can be edited for around $25, with the simpler edits ringing in  closer to $10 and the premium services coming closer to $50.  Each request receives a customized quote.  The customer can request a three, eight or 15-business day turnaround. 

 “Most consumers are not yet aware of the flexibility that custom digital editing can add to their photographic experience.  Image – Edit & Art allows consumers to eliminate unfortunate flaws in their most important images, without becoming digital editors themselves,” said Dr. Barnabás Takács, co-founder of DigitalCustom Group, Inc.

Winter is the ideal season to tackle projects like this.  Use the extra time spent indoors to drag out those boxes, sort through your photographs and know that you have photo-editing options that will finally allow you to frame those perfect images forever. 

Technical Notes: If you are planning to send your pictures via the website you first must have access to a high-speed Internet connection to better enable the email transfer of larger image files. 

If you use a digital camera, shoot with the highest resolution and save your image using your camera’s largest file size.  If you use a non-digital camera, scan your image at 300 DPI or greater or have your photography retailer scan the image.

Note: scanning from the negative will produce the highest quality digital image.

For Your Consideration: If you are determinded to do it yourself, check out the user friendly image editing software available through Applied Science Fiction.  >>Click Here for More Information.

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