Photo Editing Tools

Ever since our daughter came into our lives, I started taking a lot of photos of her. Pretty soon, I got bored of them and started playing around with photo editing tools on the phone. Like applying all those Instagram filters. When I tired of them, I found other free phone apps like Be Funky, PicsArt, AfterFocus and ColorSplash that provided other features/effects. Soon enough I began to feel that the phone is too inconvenient to do serious (aka realistic) editing because of its small size.

And so I found equivalent PC based tools, like GIMP. The PC tools offer a lot finer control compared to the phone: that in turn allows for a lot better special effects. Like this colour with black & white pic:

Recently, one of my friends showed me a tool (Photoscape) that makes it easier than ever before to clone parts of one photo onto another (Of course, even then you need practice and patience, but still, this tool allowed me to do a whole lot of things not possible before).  Like take this first photo I did with cloning:

I created the pic above the way I thought of it: my daughter is the primary and the moon is secondary. And so I cloned the moon parts on top of a pic of my daughter. Do you see the mistake with that approach?

If not, check out this second photo I did with cloning:

This time, though, I stepped back and didn’t assign primary and secondary roles to either the waves/surfboard pic or my daughter’s pic. Instead, I considered which is less effort: to clone the waves/surfboard on top of my daughter’s pic? Or to clone my daughter’s pic on top of the waves/surfboard? Obviously, the second approach is less effort, which is how I went on to do it.

Of course, with great (photo editing) power comes great responsibility! The pic below I found on the Net shows a deliberate misapplication of the replace-one-colour-with-another-colour feature to show how the entire meaning of the pic can change. So be careful how you use the features of photo editing tools!