Have you ever needed to edit an image on your computer but weren't quite sure how to get started? Perhaps you were asked to edit a picture for a company newsletter or blog article, or maybe you just wanted to touch up some vacation photos before sharing them with your friends. The truth is, almost any image can be improved with some slight editing.

While image editing might seem a bit complicated, you don't need to be a professional designer or photographer to learn how it works. Want proof? Take a look at the images below. We were able to make this photo look a lot better with a few simple adjustments, and they took less than five minutes to complete.

Whether you need to work with images at home or at the office, this tutorial will cover the basics you'll need to know to get started. You should be able to apply these techniques in almost any image editing software.

Once you know the fundamentals, you can review some of our other tutorials to learn more about using specific image editing applications.

Understanding the basics

We see digital image files every day in a wide range of places. Whenever you see a picture on a computer or smartphone, you're looking at a digital image file. When you take a picture with a digital camera, you're saving it as an image file. Even the images you see offline, like those in newspapers and magazines, probably started as digital image files before they were printed.

Have you ever thought about how image files actually work? Here are some of the basics.

Pixels

Every digital photo is made up of pixels, often abbreviated as px. You can think of a pixel as a tiny square that uses a specific color. When you look at an image file on a computer, you're really looking at thousands and thousands of pixels. But because each pixel is so small, you normally won't notice each of them unless you zoom in.

Dimensions

When you refer to the height and width of an image, you're talking about its dimensions. For example, if an image is 500 pixels wide and 200 pixels high, you could say that its dimensions are 500px by 200px (the width is usually listed first). Let's look at a few other examples.

The image below is 450px by 300px. Because this image is wider than it is tall, it's using a landscape orientation.

The image below is 300px by 450px. Because this image is taller than it is wide, it's using a portrait orientation. 

Resolution

You can think of an image's resolution as the amount of detail contained in the image. The higher the resolution, the more quality the image will have. Resolution is especially important if you're thinking of printing or resizing an image. This is because you can generally make an image smaller without noticing much of a difference in the quality. However, making an image larger than its original size will usually result in a noticeable loss in quality.

In the example below, the smaller version still looks sharp and clear.