Every month we explore a creative digital theme – For March it’s time to go back to basics as we learn to edit digital images!
Throughout this month we’ll bring you photo inspiration and video explainers to help you get started with using free and paid photo editing software. We’ll even include a visit or two to our favourite AI-powered image resources! Here’s what we’ll cover in the explainers:
- Resizing images
- Rotating and cropping images
- Applying basic colour correction
- Adding text to an image
- Creating single-colour images to use as backgrounds
These workflows are suitable for BEGINNERS, so if you’ve never even opened an image editing application before, welcome aboard!
What software will we be using?
If you’re just starting out you needn’t spend a penny – We’ll be using the excellent, FREE GIMP to introduce all five of the above topics.
If you’re ready to use something a little more powerful, Corel PaintShop Pro offers a gentle learning curve and includes lots of built-in ‘extras’. You can grab a 30 day demo now if you’d like to play along. This software offers one-time pricing after the demo expires, with the full price being regularly discounted.
Photoshop needs no introduction. We’ll cover all the beginner workflows listed above using this industry-standard software. Again, if you’re a brand new user you can get a free demo from Adobe. Photoshop is part of their subscription-based ‘Photography plan’, which is around 12 pounds a month in the UK and 12 dollars a month in the US at time of writing. It’s also part of Adobe’s wider ‘Creative Cloud’ suite of applications, for which a subscription runs to around 60 pounds / dollars a month.
We’ll start our series of explainers on 5 March with PaintShop Pro – Don’t miss it!
