Forrest Gump and photo manipulation

When you want to do some photo manipulation then the simplest techniques are usually the best. Nobody should have red eye caused by the flash because it is one click of a button and it has gone. With the quality of most cameras and the detail in each photo, it is an easy process to crop a picture correctly and still have an excellent quality for most sizes of photo. One click on the computer can also change your photo to black and white, another click or two and you have a sepia photo.

There are some techniques that require a little more skill, but there is so much help on the internet or in books that you can easily progress to opening someone's eyes or putting in a different background. I have bought some backgrounds on the internet. They are not expensive but backgrounds for the studio can be expensive. Whenever I am on holiday I take the usual tourist photos, but now you can put people into the foreground. If you have seen Forrest Gump then you will have seen some of this technique when Forrest meets Presidents Kennedy and Nixon. You can now shake hands with your hero but you will need to get a photo of them. That's a good excuse to meet them, so you may as well take a genuine photo while you are there.

Simple techniques include selecting a particular area of a picture and making it colour and the rest of the picture black and white. You may have seen this technique used for a bride holding her flowers and the flowers are the only thing in colour. Even simpler is to select an oval or rectangular section of a photo and make this colour and the rest black and white.

Happy snapping