Day 3 of our week-long look at digital photography (see overview story here) looks at some options for editing your digital pictures.

Once you have some great pictures, you next need to turn to an editing program. Editing programs let you make a variety of changes to your pictures: correct color, brightness, or contrast problems, remove red-eye, crop or resize pictures, or apply filters that drastically alter the appearance of your pictures.

Most digital cameras come with an editing program, but for most purposes you’ll get better results with other programs. We look at the top options below.

Basic Photo Editing Tools
If you use a Mac, the obvious choice is iPhoto, part of the iLife suite that is bundled with every Mac. iPhoto has all the tools you need to edit, organize, print, and share your digital photos. For more info on iPhoto, check out the following links:

     Apple’s iPhoto site | MacWorld review | Tips | Tutorial

For XP and Vista users, Picasa (from Google) is a great free editing tool. Like iPhoto, Picasa has all the tools necessary to organize and edit your pictures. Picasa integrates with a variety of photo printing services, and you can upload pictures to Picasa web albums to share pictures with others.

     Download Picasa | PC Magazine review | Getting Started | Tour

Web-based Photo Editing Tool
A new entry to the digital editing scene is Picnik, a great on-line editing tool that works on Windows or MacOS. Picnik claims “It’s the easiest way on the Web to fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye, or apply effects to your photos. It’s fast, easy, and fun.” I agree completely. While Picnik doesn’t offer the level of control that iPhoto or Picasa does, it has one-click buttons to correct a variety of common problems, lets you crop, rotate, and resize pictures, and it’s really fast. It’s an especially good option for quick editing if you’re using someone else’s computer. Click the links below for more info.

     picnik | blog | Photodoto review

High-End Photo Editing
Any of the above programs are great for general photo editing.  But for ultimate editing capabilities, nothing beats Photoshop.  It's pretty expensive for personal use, but IT Services provides Photoshop on all computer lab computers, and faculty/staff office computers.

Creating Panorama Pictures
One editing task that likely works best with the software provided by your camera manufacturer is "stitching" together shots to create panorama photos. Most digital cameras have settings to help line up multiple shots that you later combine into a single wide picture (say, of a mountain or beach scene).  For example, this panorama is actually four pictures stitched together into one (click here for a larger version).