A Beginners Guide To Photo Editing: Programs, Cameras, Photography Simplified: Apple's iPhoto. For most people, the art of photography is fairly straightforward. You take photos with your digital camera, transfer them to your computer and then share them through email or social media. If you're shooting with a smartphone, you can skip the computer part altogether. But there's an intermediary step you may be missing that can make a huge difference to your photos. A few minutes worth of fiddling in an image-editing program can breathe new life into dull photos, remove those pesky red eyes that make friends look like extras in a horror film, and rescue badly composed images that you'd normally delete. Picasa effects and filters. Reckon photo editing is too complicated? That was certainly the case in the past, and even now programs such as Adobe Photoshop are intimidating due to the preponderance of options, icons and toolbars that are scattered all over the screen. But using Photoshop for editing photos - especially for straightforward adjustments - is like riding an airplane to your local shopping centre. The latest consumer-grade photo editors are a different story. Since they're designed for everyday users, they're exceptionally easy to use and don't require any previous knowledge or experience. Common adjustments only require one or two clicks, and most programs offer an automatic adjustment setting that makes all of the necessary changes in one go. It doesn't always get it right, of course, but you'd be amazed at how much of an improvement that one click can make to your photos. Google's Picasa program (available for Windows and Mac) is one of the best applications for getting your feet wet. Not only is it free to download, but the delightfully intuitive interface turns photo editing into child's play. It's certainly not as full featured as commercial programs such as Adobe Photoshop Elements, but there are enough options and settings for beginners. A good place to start is the first tab. The "I'm Feeling Lucky, "Auto Contrast" and "Auto Color" icons automatically adjust your image with one click, and the other options are very accessible thanks to the detailed instructions that explain how to use them. If you're a little more experienced, Picasa has another section for applying manual edits (although at this stage, you may be better off moving to a more advanced program) and the other three tabs house a bunch of cool effects such as cross process, pencil sketch and Polaroid. Apple users can take advantage of the iPhoto program that's pre-installed on the latest Macs. Like Picasa, it simplifies photo editing down to a handful of one-click controls, along with a bunch of advanced settings and effects. The Enhance tool in the Quick Fixes tab is the iPhoto equivalent of auto adjustment, and if you want to give your photos a bit more impact, the Boost tool in the Effects tab subtly pumps up the colours and contrast. Cut it out One tool that's worth getting familiar with is the Crop tool. This lets you select part of the image to keep - done by drawing a rectangle around it - and it discards the rest to create a new image. Cropping is especially useful for giving poorly framed images a do-over. If your finger is blocking part of the shot, for instance, you can simply crop it out. You can also crop out any distracting elements in the background, turn it into a completely new photo by "zooming in" on one part of the image or convert landscape-oriented images into portrait orientation. Most crop tools have an option to keep the image's existing aspect ratio (the "constrain" setting in iPhoto and the "current ratio" option in Picasa) and this has its pros and cons. If you want to print your photo, keeping the original aspect ratio will ensure it fits perfectly on the paper. The downside is that you don't get as much flexibility in choosing the exact area you want to keep. If you're only going to be posting your photos online, keeping to the existing aspect ratio isn't so important, and you can even get a little creative by cropping your photos into squares or panoramas. Less is more Once you start editing photos, it's all too easy to go overboard, either by "overcooking" them so that the colours look unnatural, or overdoing it with the filters and effects. When it comes to editing your images, you should aim for fixing obvious issues such as red eye and wonky horizons first, and then make slight tweaks to other settings as needed.