Using a photo editor

Discover some of the basics of photo editing with the SquirrelEditor practice area.

In this course, can use the practice online photo editor to try the following photo editing activities:

  • Select an image
  • Brighten the image
  • Spot fix a blemish
  • Save an edited version of the image.

The interface in our SquirrelEditor practice area might look a little different to the app on your computer, or other online photo editors, but you should still be able to follow along.

The photo you can practice editing is of a girl named Amy and her beloved dog, Scruffy. The photo needs brightening, and it has a large blemish that needs fixing.

Photo editor

How the photo got into SquirrelEditor

In this example, the photo you’ll be editing is one of three already loaded into SquirrelEditor. The photo was ‘digitised’ from an old print. This was done by taking a careful, well-lit photograph of the print using a smartphone, then sharing it as an image file to a computer.

The file, along with a couple of other photo files, was then uploaded to our online photo editor application, or app, called SquirrelEditor.

Selecting a photo for editing

At the bottom of the SquirrelEditor panel is a row of thumbnails. The highlighted thumbnail in the row displays at a larger size in the panel.

  1. Click the image of Amy and Scruffy to highlight it.
  2. The picture appears at a large size in the panel and you can see the details, including the blemish.
  3. Now click the Edit button to select the image for editing and open Edit mode.

Selecting the Adjustments tab

In Edit mode, the selected image fills the panel and the thumbnails are no longer visible. You can see the image is a bit too dark, so you can check the options in the Edit menu to see what you can do about it. The options include:

  • Crop and rotate
  • Adjustments
  • Filters.

Click on Adjustments to select it and see some new options.

Adjusting the photo's brightness

The Adjustments panel includes a Brightness control, showing a row of thumbnails with different brightness levels.

  1. The highlighted thumbnail shows the current brightness of the main image in the panel.
  2. Thumbnails to the left of the highlighted thumbnail are darker, and those on the right are lighter.
  3. If you click on the thumbnail to the far right, the picture becomes too bright
  4. You can fix this immediately by clicking the next thumbnail to the left
  5. This one is just right. You’ll also see that there was no need to reload the picture or press an Undo button to get rid of the version that was too bright.

Using Spot fix to remove the blemish

The Adjustments panel includes a Spot fix tool for removing photo blemishes. You can see a mark that looks like an ink-stain on the photo of Amy and Scruffy. Let’s get rid of it!

  1. Click on the brush icon to start using the Spot fix tool.
  2. Now click the medium-sized brush icon to select it.
  3. The cursor changes to a circle that is about the same size of the blemish it will remove.
  4. Move the circle over the blemish and click the left mouse button.
  5. Voila! The blemish is gone.

SquirrelEditor intelligently chose parts of the image around the blemish and copied them over the top of the blemish. This works well on low-detail areas like the sky, but on more complex patterns you may need to click a few times so the photo editor can blend the new part of the picture over the top of the blemish more smoothly.

Checking image properties: file name and type

Now you’ve finished editing the photo, it’s time to save it. There are a few steps for this.

  1. From the Adjustments panel, click the Save as button.
  2. The Save image pop-up box appears.
  3. From the options, click the File name setting.
  4. Type a file name that will make the file easier to recognise in the future, such as amy-scruffy.
  5. SquirrelEditor has automatically set the file type to PNG (which is good for sharing online) but we want to change it to JPG (which is good for printing out).
  6. From the File type setting, click on JPG.
  7. SquirrelEditor will automatically update the file name to amy-scruffy.jpg.
  8. You could click Save now, but before doing that, let’s check the file quality and size first.

Checking image properties: file quality and dimensions

To save the image as a large, high-quality file suitable for printing, there are two settings to adjust.

  1. From the Quality setting, click on High. This ensures the photo will look good when printed out.
  2. You can see the dimensions of the photo are 9856 pixels to a side. This means the saved file will be very large (14.5 MB).
  3. You can save storage space on your computer by making the photo smaller in pixels.
  4. Click the Image width box and type the number 3264.
  5. The Image height will automatically decrease in proportion to the new Image width to ensure the photo isn’t distorted.
  6. You can see under the thumbnail the image size now says 4.5MB. Much better than 14.5MB!

Saving the edited photo

Now that the image properties have been updated, ready for printing, you can click the Save button in the pop-up box to save the edited photo. The box will close, and the edited image will display in the SquirrelEditor panel. It will also appear alongside the original image in the row of thumbnails at the bottom of the panel. You can tell which is the original and which is your edited photo because:

  • The edited photo is brighter
  • The edited photo doesn’t have the blemish between Amy and Scruffy.