NEW MEMBER: Looking for Guidance on using her Camera

[jcuknz]

Any editing such as removing a twig from across a bird's body is going to be difficult and takes time and patience, but in no way impossible. There is no easy way I am afraid and success comes with practice and ability to know what 'looks right'. My preference is Paint Shop Pro and the latest edition cost US$60 plus P&P for v.X4 or v.14 as some call it. It is a proper[ IMO ] editor like Adobe Photoshop and when I first tried to use v.7 I nearly gave up ... but then the only alternative was PS v.7 which cost $1400 v. $300 for PSP7. So I hung in there and after about a month it began to make sense and gradually I have learnt to use it.

There is a free download called Paint.Net which will get you started but to me it is a bit clunky and I am not sure if I can make it work for me becuase I'm moderately experienced.

Becuase until recently I was on dial-up my approach to posting photos is to first 'resize' to what the site wants which could be 800x600 pixels or a bit less and then apply 'compression' which reduces the file size down to something which doesn't take that long to send. IMO, and others will I'm sure disagree :-), 100Kb is ample to show a picture on a regular monitor. For e-mail I normally compress to around 30<40Kb and it still looks AOK for a 600<700 pixel across picture. But I have yet to work out how this site works so I hope I am not putting you wrong.
How you do this is very easy with PSP which does it in two stages, first the re-size and the the compression. [Image/resize] and [File/export/as a jpg] But other programmes simply have a slider and you have to save a file with the slider at say '7' and then check how large the file is after you have saved it with a different name to what you openned [ otherwise your precious camera file will be over written with the reduced size file and lost forever. ]

[jcuknz]

When you use the clone tool remember to use it with less than 100% density and soft edges. It means more clicks but the edges merge better.