The days of browsing through bulky, dusty, heavy albums with fading photographs throughout are swiftly becoming obsolete. The world is turning digital – and that includes photographs. Many people are leaving traditional family photo albums behind and jumping onto the digital bandwagon. It sounds easy enough, but becoming a digitized photo-enthusiast does take some change and effort – especially when you’re new to the digital world. If that is the case for you, then read on!

First Things First - Starting Out in the Digital Photo Galaxy

Before you even start your journey into the digital photo world, you are going to need a new best friend: a digital camera. It is not the purpose of this article to recommend or discuss this necessary tool for the digital photographer, but suffice it to say that there are many choices to choose from out there, and the a trip to your local electronics store may be in order. You can also check out the hottest new options at Amazon.com.

Organizing Your Digital Photos: The Basics

There are a number of ways out there to organize your digital photos. To start, one option you could use is simply what is built into Microsoft Windows. In My Documents (Start Menu, then My Documents), you will find a folder entitled My Pictures. You can create various folders within the My Pictures folder. For example, you could have one folder entitled "Summer Camping Trip 2007" and another marked "Winter Ski Trip 2008." If you go this route, I recommend scrolling through your photos the with the filmstrip setting (View as Thumbnails.) It makes quick scrolling through your photo album much easier. And, you can always view photo files through a slideshow.

Also, there are those who use programs created as digital photo organizers. Let’s cover a few of the options available. We will discuss iPhoto, Adobe Photoshop, Google Picasa, ACDSee, and Ulead Photo Explorer.

iPhoto

iPhoto is a Macintosh-compatible photo organization program. It can be used to do just about anything with digital photos – and holds its own among photo organizing software. iPhoto – in my opinion – also has one of the most attractive interfaces and photo gallery layout. It is the go-to photo album software for Apple users. It's extremely intuitive, and allows you to organize your photos into albums, smart albums, and more. Fully integrated into the OS X environment, iPhoto will often be seamlessly integrated into other Apple software, both from Apple and third parties as well. You can purchase iPhoto in the iLife package (which includes iMovie, iWeb, and iDVD) for $79.

Purchase iLife

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a popular photo editing software, with an extensive array of options available to the professional. It's not necessarily used for organizing your photos, but can be a valuable tool for the digital photographer. If you plan on doing more in-depth editing of your photos than organizing, Adobe Photoshop might be the software for you. For personal use, I would stick with Adobe Photoshop Elements. It may not be as involved as CS3, but its price tag is much more in line with families ($100). However, if you want to make digital photography a hobby and a passion, CS3 might be worth it ($650).

Purchase Photoshop Elements

Purchase Photoshop CS3

Google Picasa

For those wanting to organize their photos without the price tag, Google Picasa would be a perfect option. (I mean, who doesn’t like the price tag of $0?) And don’t think that you are going to get a rinky-dink piece of software not worth the trouble of downloading. Google Picasa has quite the punch packed within its costless photo organization program. It’s easy to use, simple, and free. Its editing tools may not be as powerful as Photoshop’s, but it does have features which will do just fine for the casual photographer.

Download Google Picasa

ACDSee

ACDSee Photo Manager is a pretty handy tool for those Windows users serious about photo organization, with a few additional features. Features such as Instant Viewing, keyword searching, and personalized slideshows make this photo organizer a hit among digital photography professionals and beginners alike. ACDSee’s reasonable price of $50 makes it all the easier to enjoy without straining your pocketbook.

Purchase ACDSee Photo Manager

ULead Photo Explorer

Finally, Ulead Photo Explorer is raved upon by critics and users alike. Its usability is key to its success. And the price tag of $30 isn’t bad either, eh? For beginners in the digital photography arena, this may be just the ticket.

Purchase Ulead Photo Explorer

Tips, Hints, and Other Cool Stuff

So, now you’ve got your digital photos taken, and the program of your choice in hand. What now? Let me pass on a few starter tips and hints.

First off, get and stay organized. This tip may seem self-explanatory. However, I know from experience how easy it is to get lazy and just unload all the photo files from the digital camera into some vague directory entitled something like “Stuff.” I admit it, I’ve done just that. But maybe that’s just me. Anyway, it can get a bit confusing to go and try to organize your photos into various directories. I recommend placing the photos into their respective areas as soon as you unload them from your camera onto your PC. It makes things much easier to organize later.

Also, get specific when organizing your photos. If you want to create a directory for a camping trip, have the season and year included in the filename of each photo, as well as the location. For example, instead of simply labeling it “Camping Trip,” label the file something like “Summer 2006 Camping Trip 1” or “Summer Camping Trip in Montana 1.” Then you won’t be as likely to mix up camping trip files if you happen to frequent the great outdoors.

Another pointer: back up your digital photos! Whether you have an exterior storage drive, burn CDs or DVDs, or a website, it is always wise to create a backup. This is one great thing about digital photos – it is much easier and cheaper to have digital backup photos. If your computer crashes, pull out the CDs or dig into the archives of your external hard drive. However, if you don’t create backups and your PC goes kaput, your past memories may be lost.

Fixing Up Your Digital Photos Like The Pros

Let’s talk a bit about common digital photo flaws and how you can fix them quickly. You don’t have to be a Photoshop guru to enhance photos. Red eye is one of the more common flaws of photos – both on film and digital. Even with a fancy-schmancy digital camera with a red eye reduction feature, you’re still going to get red eye at times. Fortunately, most all photo editors come with a red eye reduction tool. All the ones mentioned in this article do. So, try your hand at it, and watch the magic happen.

Just like life, photos are never perfect. Some may disagree, but all have flaws – that’s just reality. Your job as a photo editor (one of the many hats you’ll be wearing as a digital photographer) is to cut out some of the most glaring flaws. Red eyes are one of those blaring imperfections that can be easily remedied. So are some facial blemishes. A good tip for dealing with glaring facial imperfections or discolorations is by zooming into the photo very deeply, and repairing the blemish pixel by pixel. You can use a utility such as Photoshop to do this, although it is time consuming to do it this way. It will be much more difficult to notice errors you may have created trying to fix the imperfection when the photo is zoomed out all the way. Programs such as iPhoto can automatically touch up the picture, or have a tool to remove blemishes and photo imperfections more easily.

Other errors you may want to improve on may include a blurred or an overly bright or dark photo. Most photo editors include tools such as line sharpeners (which may aid in sharpening the blurred image) or photo enhancers. Some even have auto brightness adjusters, making your job as editor much easier.

Sometimes, you may not want to try to blot out a photo error, but just change or eliminate the background. This is made easy with photo editors as well with cropping tools (used to cut the picture down and eliminate the background) and blurring options for the background. This may take some experimenting to master, but it is sure fun when it all works out and you successfully eliminate a drab or hideous backdrop to what is otherwise a fine photograph.

One last tip: when you are trying to improve or enhance a photo, you might want to save the original as something you can always go back to if your edited version doesn’t turn out as best as you had hoped.

Conclusion

Here's a wrapup of what we covered:

• Organizing your digital photos using filenames and folders
• Various programs that you can use to organize and enhance your photos
• How to back up your digital photos
• Tips and tricks on how to enhance your photos

You'll learn a lot more along the way as you experiment with your new digital toy. Now get out there, get snapping your photos, and you'll be sharing your precious moments like a pro in no time!

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