Photo editing has become an important part of digital photography nowadays. Even if you have a simple point and shoot camera or the top of the line digital camera, you can always find some photo editing techniques useful in enhancing the artistic side of your pictures.

Of course, good pictures relay good messages to the viewer and of course, we all want to look at pictures with great admiration. Enhancing and editing wedding pictures, for example, is one of the most common and popular use of good photo editing techniques. It is also important in enhancing photos for your website, your ads and in just making your personal photos more exciting and glamorous.

Learning to enhance or manipulate photos can be exciting and once you get to know some of the amazing tools and possibilities of improving your pictures, you will eventually love to learn more about it. Here are some of the basic photo editing techniques that you may want to start with to see the magic in your photos.

– Adjusting brightness and contrast. Adjusting the brightness and contrast of a photo is probably the most common editing most people need in their pictures. If you have a dark or overexposed picture, you can correct this using a wedding photo editing software. You can use the menu on brightness and contrast and manually adjust them separately to get the desired result. In Adobe Photoshop, you can also use the ‘Auto Level’ or the ‘level’ button to adjust the brightness and contrast simultaneously and have more control on the adjustments.

– Adjusting hue and saturation. If you want to make the colors of your picture crisp and brighter, try adjusting the hue and saturation of your picture. Increasing the saturation of your picture makes the colors stronger. You can also turn your picture into black and white by setting the saturation to zero. You can actually experiment with this tool to help you get that perfect sharpness in color and turn that dull picture into a brighter one.

– Sharpening and blurring part of your pictures. Sharpening and blurring are also very useful photo editing techniques to create focus on your picture or give that ordinary wedding picture some dreamy effect. If you want a magazine-perfect photo that makes your face looks smooth and glamorous, you can use blurring and sharpening tools. If you are a fan of Adobe Photoshop, you can use the Filter menu and then select some blurring tools such as the Gaussian blur, which is popular in photo editing, the motion blur, if you want to enhance your photo of a moving subject and many other types of blurring.

– Changing or removing backgrounds. Yes, you can actually change or remove the background of your photos – easily. In Photoshop, it involves creating layers and adding ‘Layer Masks’. You can actually find some good tutorials to help you walk through the process.

– Cloning techniques. Cloning allows you to remove unwanted objects or distractions in your photograph. If you want to get rid of your dark spots and blemishes in your face in your close-up picture, you can also make use of the cloning tool to help you copy the normal color or lightness of your skin.