Discover Digital Photography

The curves tool is a simple but powerful tool that allows you to brighten, darken, add contrast, and correct or modify the color balance of your photos. As well as being easy to use, it allows you to make fine grained adjustments that will only effect certain parts of the photo.

Most photo editing programs, such as Paintshop Pro, , GIMP, and many others include the curves tool. In this article we'll look at how to use curves, and some example adjustments.

Great pictures don't necessarily come from high-end cameras and expensive lenses. Here are tips that you can apply even when using cameras like the one on the IPhone. If you can use these principles to get great pictures using basic cameras, imagine how much better a photographer you'll be with serious photography gear!

Many times we might see a beautiful scene in front of us, take a few shots, but then when we get home and view the photos on the computer, we end up disappointed. Although there was a great scene we somehow couldn't capture it effectively with our camera.

This happens because our mind works differently to a camera, which just captures what it sees. You can't really have a crooked horizon in what you see, and your mind might ignore some distracting element, while your camera won't.

However, all is not lost. We can capture great photos that record what we saw, and more importantly, the emotion we felt. The following landscape photography tips will help you do that.

What Have I Done? by tropicaLiving - Jessy... on flickr (licensed CC-BY-SA)

The skills to take great portraits will depend on after having a few essential "rules" I've reduced to those portrait photography tips. Even if you're just starting out, following these pointers may help you in improving your portraits.

There probably isn't a week that goes by without someone asking me which camera I think they should buy. Usually they expect me to tell them buy Canon or Nikon or some other big manufacturer. They often ask me to compare features such as mega pixels for them and they seem to spend hours agonising over which camera is the best value for money. When I tell them to forget all this they think I have gone mad. But once they understand my three golden rules life becomes much simpler.

Have you ever hiked for two or three hours to get somewhere; took tons of photos, but when they came back you were disappointed? Somehow you lost the magic; it just didn’t feel the same. How do you know the difference between a waterfall that is 200 feet tall, or an extreme close-up of a creek trickling over some rock 2 inches tall? In some cases you don’t. Now if you are doing that on purpose, that’s cool. It’s called an optical illusion. But . . . if you’re doing it by accident, that’s called poor photography.

Following on from the previous post on Fall photography tips, here are three filters that can help you take better Fall photos. You don't need any filters to take great Fall photos, but these filters can help you enhance reflections and color, and give moving water a silky look.

Fall is a great time of year for photography, with the changing colors, early misty mornings, and the days closing in means you don't have to get up at an unearthly hour capture a nice sunrise. In this article I'll share some tips to help you get better Fall photos.

Geotagging (also known as geocoding or geoencoding) your photos allows you to view your photos on a map and see where they were taken. There are also a variety of photo sharing services that allow you to add geotagged photos, so that others can see exactly where your photos were taken as well.

This can be a great idea with photos taken out on a walk, or while on vacation. It also works well with photos of wildlife and flowers, allowing you to see where and what sort of habitat the photo was taken in from the map.

If you are a keen landscape photographer one of your main challenges will be how to locate places that will provide excellent opportunities to create stand out photographs.  Your first port of call will probably be the work of other photographers in your area.  You can see their work at exhibitions or at photography clubs or via their personal websites or blogs.

Another way to view photographer's work of your area is to browse social networking sites such as Flickr.  Flickr gives you the ability to search for photographs across the millions that are stored in its database.  If you search by town name or county you will end up with a filtered list of photographs that have been taken in your area. Flickr encourages tagging of photographs with keywords, so as long as the contributor has tagged their photograph with the relevant place name it will appear in the search results.

Portholland by Johan J.Ingles-Le Nobel on flickr (licensed CC-BY-ND)