Digital camera technology has given you a digital camera by which you can take a digital camera photo. This photo can be transferred to your laptop and altered by the use of photo editing software. Photo editing is therefore, the process by which digital images are altered by specialized photo editing software, which are either vector graphics editors or bitmap graphics editors. With these tools, you can manipulate, transform, and enhance your digital camera photos. Photo editing is widely used in the fields of science, medicine, and forensics.

Digital camera photo editing basics

* Pixels - Pixels store bitmap images in the form of a grid. The value of these pixels can be changed, as a group or individually, to alter the image's brightness and color by the sophisticated algorithms of the photo editors. Photo editing software can be bitmap graphics editors, or vector based graphics editors. Photo editing software are readily available due to the large scale sale of digital cameras. Most digital cameras provide simple operations as rotating and cropping.

* Compression - To reduce file size and save storage many digital cameras use compression, where the surplus data is discarded and lost. Thus compression can be either lossless or lossy. JPEG file format is lossy compression, PNG, TIFF and RAW file formats are lossless compressions. The greater the compression, the lesser is the quality of the photo. The digital camera and the photo editing software let the user to select the compression level.

Some popular digital camera photo editing software

Popular raster-based digital photo editors, which are available at any digital camera store, are:

* Adobe Photoshop
* Corel Photo-Paint
* Paint Shop Pro
* Visualizer Photo Studio
* PixBuilder Photo Editor
* Fo2Pix ArtMaster
* Pixel image editor

Digital camera photo editing software features
* Selection
* Layers
* Image size alteration
* Cropping an image
* Histogram
* Noise removal
* Removal of unwanted elements
* Selective color change
* Image gradient
* Image orientation
* Merging of images
* Special effects
* Change color depth
* Lens correction
* Contrast and brightness correction
* Sharpening and softening images
* Color adjustments

Digital camera photo editing is crucial for professionals
Photo editors provide the tools for enhancing, changing, and improving photos in many ways. They accept a large number of formats, including JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and RAW file formats. They allow almost any desired size of the photo. However, if the photo is enlarged without increasing the resolution, then the photo cracks or the pixel breaks. So before enlarging, the resolution has to be adequately increased. The file size also increases with an increase in resolution, but quality does not suffer. Reducing the photo size always results in better sharpness, hence when you take a photo with your digital camera, you must know what you will do with the photo. If it is for printing, then take it at a higher resolution, and if it is for sending via email, then take it at a lower resolution. After making the necessary corrections, like elimination of noise, adjustment of size, color, brightness and contrast, removing unwanted elements, red eyes, and sharpening the photo, the photo can be saved in any desired format with varying degree of compression. Serious digital camera users will find photo editing a crucial part of giving professional quality to any digital camera photo.