Photo Tips and Guidelines from Adobe Digital Kids Club

Portraits of Learning 2008

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The Adobe Digital Kids Club site was created to give teachers and students resources to integrate digital photography in their classroom as well as at home. Here are some tips and guidelines from the Adobe Digital Kids Club site that will assist you in taking better photos as well as editing them for submission. Get creative and take advantage of the fun features that Photoshop Elements has to manipulate your photos into works of art. If you simply want to edit your photos, try out the free trial versions of Adobe® Photoshop® Elements or Adobe Photoshop Album.

1. Taking pictures
http://www.adobe.com/education/digkids/intro/goingdigital/takingpictures.html
Digital cameras can help you take better pictures. You can take as many photos as you want and not worry about whether you got the shot or not.

2. Editing pictures
http://www.adobe.com/education/digkids/intro/goingdigital/editingpictures.html
As much fun as you had taking pictures, editing adds the little extra something that makes digital so cool. To unleash your inner artist, use Adobe® Photoshop® Album or Adobe Photoshop Elements. Anything's possible. You can make a color photo look black and white. Remove red eye. Create greeting cards. Run a slide show. Stitch together a panorama photo. Or twist, twirl and liquify photos.

• Single-click fixes for color, contrast, and sharpness
  http://www.adobe.com/education/digkids/tips/psa/fixes.html
  Sometimes, a digital photograph doesn't come out as planned. The colors might not be as vibrant as you remember, or the picture might be too dark, or the image might come out a bit fuzzy. Don't worry, it happens to everyone. Luckily, Adobe® Photoshop® Album makes it really simple to fix these (and many other) common digital photography problems. Just use Photoshop Album's "single-click fix" features to repair your photographic accident, or to tweak a good picture into greatness.
  Click here for a free download of the Adobe® Photoshop® Album Starter Edition.
• Remove Red Eye
  http://www.adobe.com/education/digkids/tips/psa/psa_redeye.html
  Red eye is one of the most common photographic problems. No, we're not talking about some itchy irritation that affects the eyes and makes it hard to see. We're talking about the bright red glow in people's eyes that happens with flash photography.
• The art of cropping
  http://www.adobe.com/education/digkids/tips/photo/cropping.html
  Just like when you get a hair cut, you can make photos look better by cutting them. It's called "cropping." Knowing what and when to crop can make the difference between a good photo and a great one. Cropping gets rid of extra parts of a photo and focuses on what matters. There are a couple of different ways to crop a photo. The first is with the camera. The other is with image editing software like Adobe® Photoshop® Elements or Adobe Photoshop Album.

3. The art of the closeup
http://www.adobe.com/education/digkids/tips/photo/closeup.html
There's a hidden world of photography right under your nose. It's a world of colors and shapes and textures, and very few people ever notice it. It's the world of close-up photography, a technique where focusing on very small details makes very large impressions. Close-up photography is about seeing things from a different point of view, and it's easier than you might think.

4. Artistic photo manipulation
http://www.adobe.com/education/digkids/tips/elements_samples.html
It's great that digital cameras allow people to take amazing photographs of people, places, or things. But sometimes it's more fun to take your photographs and do something artistic with them. Take a photograph of something in your personal universe and turn it into a work of art. It's easy to do.

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