According to the Tate Art Museum, digital art has been around for about forty years. The heyday of digital art probably came during the early 2000s, when advanced photo editing software became widely available to the public.
Photo manipulation has become a controversial term in the years since, but it’s far from a dishonest or evil medium. It’s all about how you use it.
Advertising is a common use of digital art, and sometimes it’s used unethically. For instance, companies often make models look impossibly beautiful. Others just design a logo or add more light to a dark photo.
We’ll offer some advice on photo manipulation in this article.
Learn How and Where to Crop
Have you ever taken a picture and realized that certain things don’t need to be there. Maybe these things distract from the intended focus of the photo. The solution to this is cropping, a term that refers to cutting away part of an image.
Cropping can help focus an image so that the subject is truly the main point of the photo. You can also remove an element of a photo and graft it onto another image. We’d recommend using a background remover if you want to be minimalist or change the setting of the photo.
Get the Lighting Right
Sometimes, the pictures we take come out too dark or even too bright. This makes the picture blurred and difficult to figure out. Knowing how light and shadow affect images will make it easier to add the right amount of light to the pictures while making them look real.
Making things look real is more important than most of us might imagine. Getting the details right can take some time to learn, but it’s a necessary skill if you want to be an artist. Humans have a knack for noticing small flaws, even if they don’t consciously know they’re doing it.
This phenomenon is called the Uncanny Valley, and it usually refers to robots, computer images, and the like. However, a similar thing can happen in any situation that isn’t quite as it seems.
Experiment With Saturation
Saturation is the amount of color in a picture and how striking that color is. While light can increase the brightness to a certain extent, it won’t change the actual shade of the colors.
One prominent example of this is a neon sign, especially at night. The colors are vibrant and grab your attention while the scene itself isn’t overly bright. Lower saturation images with bright lighting often have a cheery but unfocused look, as if watching through a thin layer of mist.
The Basics of Photo Manipulation
Photo manipulation has become an important aspect of digital art, and being able to skillfully manipulate photos can be the key to becoming a respected digital artist. We’ve discussed some of the basics of photo editing in this article, but there’s always more to learn.
You can learn more about the Windows operating system and its various uses right here on our site.
