Photos Can Come Alive

From adding shades to the color of the sky or the fields to polishing off the wrinkles from an elderly lady's face, from creating out-of-this-world special effects for film posters to touching up a model's face for a fashion magazine, you can practically add effects to photos for achieving any desirable result. All of this comes under the field of image editing. If you want to add effects to photos without bothering to learn about image-editing, there are readymade photo effects at your disposal all over the Internet.

Many of the photos that we see in fashion magazines, interior decoration magazines, photography magazines or newspapers are edited some way or the other. In some, the back-lighting is adjusted, whereas in others the image is made a little sharper. In fact, there has been a severe controversy in the fashion world regarding this. Some models claim that these magazines add effects to photos in order to achieve the ultra-elegant look on their pages, but in the process the model's face and body are no longer recognizable.

Photographers around the world are divided on the debate of whether one should add effects to photos. Some are of the opinion that effects hamper the originality and the inherent rawness of the photos. But there is another section which believes that digital photo effects enhance their photos to a large extent. They also believe that tools like red eye reduction and noise reduction are very useful, because they cover up small blemishes in their photos. As a matter of fact, if creativity of the photographer is high, he/she can make the photos a hundred times better by adding appropriate effects.

Photo effects are not only for professional photographers to use during post processing. Graphics designers can also use effects like black and white, sepia, old film, movie and vintage while working with stock photos for websites and magazines. Amateurs can also add effects to photos with the use of some preloaded effects on graphics software or ready-made effects from websites.

Telling people that you add effects to photos may seem trivial, but when image-editing is seen as a profession, it is a very lucrative one. Professionals in the field of image editing are paid highly. They are employed by the biggest fashion magazines, newspapers, advertising agencies, website designing and graphics designing companies.

There is a wide range of options when it comes to image editing. With new advancements in software and mobile apps, a professional in this field has to be versatile. He has to adapt to new software and keep on learning new tricks. One cannot just add effects to photos randomly; he/she has to be very creative and artistic. People without any prior experience can also try their hand at image-editing. With the abundance of websites and web applications providing free effects, one can just experiment while trying to add effects to photos. These effects are so easy to use that if you don't like a specific effect, you can immediately discard the whole effect and switch to another one.