- Editing Your Photos
- Photo Editor's Filters and Visual Effects
- Make Your Photos More Dynamic with Photographic Effects
- Summary
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Photo Editor’s Filters and Visual Effects
You can use any of the Photo Editor’s editing tools to alter your photos, and the Fire offers a pretty powerful range of capabilities:
- Enhance improves the color balance of the photo instantly by automatically lightening or darkening the image, boosting dull colors, and/or raising the contrast. The Hi-Def option is useful for sharpening an image.
- Crop cuts off part of the photo. You can improve some photos by reframing the composition of the shot to remove unwanted areas. Cropping is a great way to correct shot composition, and it can help to change the focal point and remove distractions, emphasizing the main subject of the shot. You can choose a custom crop size or a fixed crop size. To customize the cropping, drag the four handles on the corners of the image.
- Orientation rotates the image or flips it horizontally or vertically.
- Redeye addresses a common photographic anomaly; when the camera’s flash reflects off the back of the subject’s eyes, it gives them a red glow. Use the Redeye feature to replace that red with normal eye colors.
- Effects displays a list of edgy color filters you can apply to your photos to give them an extra artistic flourish. Previews of your image with the various effects applied appear at the bottom of the screen. We’ll look at the Effects tools in more detail shortly.
- Stickers offers a collection of animated stickers you can superimpose on pictures, ranging from sunglasses to sombreros and magic hats. This option can liven up a photo for a good laugh.
- Text adds colored text to a photo.
- Meme adds text, specifically at the top and bottom of a photo, enabling you to create your own Internet memes.
- Draw provides colored pens you can use to draw with your finger on a photo.
- Brightness allows you to brightens or darkens a photo to make its contents more (or less) visible, altering the visual dynamic.
Contrast sharpens or brightens the light and dark areas of a photograph. I tapped Contrast in Figure 4 to apply the effect to this photo of a nightclub at the House of Blues, gaining a more dramatic feel.
Saturation adjusts the intensity of color in a photo. Notice how the Saturation effect made the colors really vivid in Figure 5.
- Warmth gives your photos a warm or cool aesthetic. The warm aesthetic is usually associated with intensified red, orange, and yellow colors in the image; the cool aesthetic leans more toward the blue range.
- Whiten allows you to whiten the teeth of subjects in portraits.
Blemish removes minor blemishes from a portrait. This feature is commonly used for skin blemishes such as acne.
Sharpness enhances the definition of edges in a photograph. In Figure 6, I added Sharpness to these flowers for a crisper image.
- Focus helps you to achieve the effect of lenses with a much shallower depth of field. When using this tool, you can decide the focal point of a photo by selecting the area. This feature can help you lead the viewer’s eye to a specific area in the photograph by having the main subject in sharp focus, and leaving other parts of the image out of focus.
Splash performs simple color isolation in a photo (see Figure 7). When you select this tool, your color photo turns to black-and-white. Use your finger to “paint” the areas where you want to restore the color. This play on color isolation is commonly referred to as the “Pleasantville effect.”
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