Image Editing

Digital image editing is the process of altering digital images, whether they be digital photographs or other types of digitally represented images. more...

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Specialised software programs called vector graphics editors or raster graphics editors are the primary tools with which a user may manipulate, enhance, and transform images. These editors are capable of editing images in many diverse ways.

Digital imaging is closely associated with digital photography and is used extensively in the fields of digital art, science, medicine, and forensics.

Basics of image editing

Raster images are stored in a computer in the form of a grid of picture elements called pixels. These pixels contain the image's color and brightness information. Image editors can change the pixels to enhance the image in many ways. The pixels can be changed as a group, or individually, by the sophisticated algorithms within the image editors. The domain of this article primarily refers to bitmap graphics editors, which are often used to alter photographs and other raster graphics. However, vector-based software, such as Adobe Illustrator can be used to alter or construct other types of image, namely ones based upon vectors. Adobe Photoshop is the most common application commercially used for digitally manipulating images.

Image editing programs

Because of the popularity of digital cameras, image editing programs are readily available. Minimal programs, that perform such operations as rotating and cropping are often provided within the digital camera itself, while others are returned to the user on a compact disc (CD) when images are processed at a discount store. The more powerful programs contain functionality to perform a large variety of advanced image manipulations. Popular raster-based digital image editors include Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photo-Paint, Paint Shop Pro, Visualizer Photo Studio, Pixel image editor, PixBuilder Photo Editor, Fo2Pix ArtMaster, the GIMP, and Paint.net. For more, including free programs, see: List of raster graphics editors.

Digital data compression

Many image file formats use data compression to reduce file size and save storage space. Digital compression of images may take place in the camera, or can be done in the computer with the image editor. When images are stored in JPEG format, compression has already taken place. Both cameras and computer programs allow the user to set the level of compression.

Some compression algorithms are lossless, such as PNG, which means no image quality is lost when the file is saved. The JPEG compression algorithm uses a lossy format. The greater the compression, the lesser the quality. It utilizes the way the brain and eyes perceive color to make loss of detail less noticeable.

Read more at Wikipedia.org