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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
Click on Adjustments to select it and see some new options.
The Adjustments panel includes a Brightness control, showing a row of thumbnails with different brightness levels.
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!
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.
Now you’ve finished editing the photo, it’s time to save it. There are a few steps for this.
To save the image as a large, high-quality file suitable for printing, there are two settings to adjust.
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: