All of us have some idea about Digital Art, as we see many magazines displaying pictures of past and present, young and old celebrities together. They are smoothly touched up and blended using software like Photoshop. It definitely looks like an original photograph. Changing backgrounds, making collages, and replacing faces, are some of the popular techniques widely used in Digital Arts. If we have a PC with Image Editing Software, we can also use certain tools on the images, especially filters. But we cannot produce the kind of professional work we see around, and all we end up doing, is twisting, sharpening the image or just applying texture or text on it.

What we need to understand, is that the scope of Digital Art is so wide, that we have to learn, practice and update the techniques continuously to produce professional quality work. Image Editing Software provides different methods to achieve similar results with different degrees of controls. Methods also changes according to each software. We need to find the most suitable method, to get accurate results, in as less time as possible.

In this series of Digital Art articles, we will try to see some of the aspects of the mystical world of photo retouching and image effects.

Original	Corrected

The first step towards Digital Art is to understand the image you are working with. Just observe the image, and see what you need to do immediately. Initially, do not get into the technical details like formats and resolution.

Let us understand this by example. I received the image (at the left) which I was supposed to upload with an article. The picture was not properly scanned, so I turned it anticlockwise a bit, to make it straight. Then I needed to remove unwanted portions of the picture. For that, I had to crop it and keep the part I needed. After applying all the required techniques and a bit of retouching work, what I got was a properly balanced image that could be used for the article.

This first step is quite tricky if you have to deal with different formats and resolutions. You also have to consider the end use of the image. I used this image for web purposes. If I wanted to use it for printing, I would have to process it differently, but still I would have had to make it straight using the same commands specified earlier.

In the next article we will see how we can make collages.