Anytime you take a close up image, it’s easy to find areas to change: soften a wrinkle, add a sparkle to the eyes, or remove traces of acne. While I’ve used Photoshop for years, I’ll be the first to admit I’m not an expert. I know the things to help my images become better – and, well, that’s about it.

If you’re trying to break into the photography business, learning all there is about the business and taking better photos is more than enough. So why not make your life a little easier, and use tools that can work for you – instead of making you spend hours in a training class?

Anthropics Technology’s Portrait Professional software makes the entire process easy. Instead of requiring you to understand and use an array of tools and filters to perform adjustments, it automates much of the process for you.

When you open up your photograph and launch the program, you are guided through each step. Start by choosing Male or Female to set the default facial adjustments for that gender. From there, select the five points on the face for eyes, nose and mouth. You can fine tune the points, and facial outline marks.

Once these adjustments are in place, the image is process in a matter of seconds. The photo is not over-retouched – just softened and reshaped to give you a much more pleasing portrait.

And if you still want further adjustment, you can alter each item individually to your liking. The more you learn, the more sophisticated you can take your retouching.

Portrait Professional comes in two versions – standard and studio. By upgrading to the studio version, you will have additional support for RAW images up to 16 bits per color and professional quality image color calibration.

You can download a free trial to give it a whirl. Right now you can save $30 and buy Portrait Professional 9 for $69.95. Or save $50 off the Portrait Professional Studio 9 for $99.95.

Want a quick, easy way to alter a photograph? Consider Pixlr.

I always have a variety of photo editing tools open every day. For sophisticated corrections, Photoshop may have everything you need – and more. But let’s say you just want to create a portrait for your blog, and you’d like to vignette it for added emphasis. Or maybe you want to convert it from color to black and white, and sharpen it a bit.

Pixlr makes the entire process easy – and for a free program, you can’t beat the price.

When you head to pixlr’s home page, you have two options: you can enter the Image Editor or the Photo Express with a click of a button.

Choose your photo either from your hard drive, or with a URL. The image opens up in the editor, and instantly allows you to begin editing.

With the Image Editor, you have many different controls, and its set up similar to Photoshop. With Photo Express, you can choose to instantly apply the most popular actions all with a click of the button. The image I have above I made three corrections in about 10 seconds, saved and posted to my blog with just a few additional seconds. While Photo Express may not be what you’re looking for to create a quality product for your customers, I love it for creating blog images. It’s quick and easy, and lets you accomplish things without having to open up a large program and wait while it loads.

The great thing about having access to the Internet is the possibilities are endless.

I’ve reviewed in the past photo editing sites Picture2Life and Picnic. Today lets look at photo editing tool and photo manager Splashup.

Splashup works with any of the major photo sharing service (Facebook, Flickr) on the web today. Or simply upload your images directly from your computer. From there, you can manipulate your images using a variety of tools.

Try blending your photos together. Splashup allows you to work in layers, merging them together to create a final combined image.

Used to working with filters? Splashup has a variety of filters to do everything from sharpening your image, to adjusting the hue/saturation. And they promise more filters to come.

Love adding text to your graphics for your blog posts? (I know I do) Splashup has a tool that allows you to add text, and skew it into different directions.

It even has multiple image editing features, that allows you to edit more than one photograph at a time.

Splashup even has a Splashup Light version with not quite as many features, making it even easier to control your images from a mobile PC. Simply download and you’re on your way.

Best of all, no charge for these easy to use tools.

As a professional photographer, you probably have Photoshop and use it regularly. But as a professional it’s also fun to try other sites and services, just to have alternatives every once in awhile.

The thing I like best about some of the online editors is that they are online. It doesn’t matter if you have your computer with you for access to your own version of Photoshop. From any computer, you login to your account and start playing with your photographs.

Today I decided to play with Picture2Life. Picture2Life is an easy to use online image editor that allows you to manipulate your photographs, and create collages and animations. It also interfaces with all photo sharing websites and blogs, such as Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook, Blogger, WordPress, etc.

The Picture2Life interface has over 50 different effects and adjustments for you to choose from. Simply click on your preference, and preview the effects before applying them. You can even combine multiple images together in collage format, as they have over 200 layouts ready for you to use.

The power of Picture2Life comes from its ease of use. Dropping in your photography is easy – either upload from your hard drive, or choose a photo from one of your other photo sharing sites. Once its in the editor, you can change and manipulate with a simple click of the mouse. Each task shows you an example and gives a brief description, so there is little guess work about what will be applied.

Plus the biggest benefit is it’s all at no cost to you. Just login through your free account, and start playing.

The internet has created some amazing products for the digital photography industry. While everyone likes to use cutting edge programs like Adobe Photoshop, some prefer to save on the retail and search for alternatives. Well, thanks to open source and combined minds, a program is on the net that allow graphics manipulation. Gimp is an image graphic package loaded with amazing features in a compact and free price tag.

Here a just a couple of the full feature that this amazing program has:

Customizable Interface – Each task requires a different environment and GIMP allows you to customize the view and behavior the way you like it. Starting from the widget theme,  allowing you to change colors, widget spacings and icon sizes to custom tool sets in the toolbox. The interface is modulized into so called docks, allowing you to stack them into tabs or keep them open in their own window. Pressing the tab key will toggle them hidden.

Digital Retouching –   GIMP is ideal for advanced photo retouching techniques. Get rid of unneeded details using the clone tool, or touch up minor details easily with the new healing tool. With the perspective clone tool, it’s not difficult to clone objects with perspective in mind just as easily as with the orthogonal clone.

Visit the gimp.org site to download the latest version and see what a collective community can do with your next digital photography image.

Are you overwhelmed with the complexities of Adobe Photoshop? We have found some sites that offer simple photo editor solutions to your digital image needs.

Picnik – Allow you to upload images from your computer with a simple interface. Edit functions include Auto-fix, Rotate, Crop, Resize, Exposure, Colors, Sharpen and even Red-Eye.

Dozens and dozens of fonts, shapes, frames, all the effects and the touch-up tools are yours. Plus, all the Edit tools, the ability to undo everything you’ve ever done to your picture, and it remembers the history of the past five pictures you worked on!  Free version available which includes ads or pay a nominal fee of $24.95 to upgrade to the premium and remove the ads.

Premium: All that and then some! You get ALL the effects, frames, fonts, shapes, plus NEW advanced editing tools Curves and Levels, which have all the power found in expensive software packages but with one-click defaults and the added shine that all things Picni k have. You also get Priority Help Support, new feature previews, professional FontShop fonts and other exclusive content, the ability to access all your favorite photo sites at the same time to use Picnik to transfer photos between them, unlimited Photo History, a completely ad-free experience, AND the warm fuzzies of knowing you helped support a little photo-editor startup!