Five easy editing fixes for flawed photos

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»	Eliminate red-eye
»	Improve lighting
»	Boost washed-out colour
»	Crop to get great photos
»	Correct poor focus and blurs
»	Product recommendations

Eliminate red-eye

Getting rid of red-eye is one of the simplest digital photo fixes.

Thanks to today's photo editing software, you can make red-eye disappear with a few little digital tricks. Here are three easy ways to get the red out:

Many newer digital cameras feature in-camera red-eye removal, as do some printers.
HP Photosmart Essential (available as a free download), has a red-eye removal feature. Using this software, fixing photos is as easy as highlighting the problem area and clicking.

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Improve lighting

Adjust contrast levels to lighten your photograph.

Using a flash, or providing backlighting can help even out exposure, but what about when you've already taken your photo? Not to worry: there are easy ways to correct lighting in your digital photographs.

If you're using photo-editing software such as HP Photosmart Essential or Premiere, you have several options:

Use the Color & Light feature
Select Adaptive Lighting to brighten dark shadows
Use the Auto Fix feature

If using other software such as Photoshop Elements, look for an Enhance feature or ways to adjust contrast.

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Boost washed-out colour

Increase saturation and contrast to add visual drama to a photo.

Color is emotion: bright, vivid colours are cheerful and exciting, muted colours are more nostalgic. Whether correcting a photograph's hues for accuracy, improving a scanned image, or experimenting with style to draw out more emotion from your pictures, today's photo editing solutions make it easy.

HP Photosmart Essential and HP Photosmart Premiere feature Faded Color and Auto Fix buttons to boost the colours in your photograph.
Other digital photo-editing software contain colour enhancement features such as Saturation to either help save a muted photograph or simply give it more richness and depth.

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Crop to get great photos

Cropping lets you get closer to your subject for a more compelling photograph.

Sometimes correct framing can make a throwaway picture a work of art. Give existing photos better composition when editing using these tips:

Cropping: Use photo editing software to remove distracting elements. Select the Crop option, then click and drag the handles on the crop box to resize the crop area to your liking.
Vertical and horizontal: Some photographs lend themselves best to one orientation over another, so feel free to experiment with the Rotate feature of your software.
Use the Rule of Thirds: "Divide" your subject into three sections horizontally and vertically, then position your subject at the intersection of those lines.

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Correct poor focus and blurs

Reduce blur and sharpen the images to rescue fuzzy photographs.

If you find yourself with a beautiful, one-of-a-kind photograph but think it unusable due to blur, think again.

Photo editing software, such as HP Photosmart Essential and HP Photosmart Premiere, contain an Enhance feature that can sharpen otherwise fuzzy photographs.

With professional-grade software like Photoshop, you can use the Unsharp Mask, which locates and sharpens the areas within your photograph where colours change.

Also helpful is subtly adjusting contrast and saturation levels to further clarify your image.