If you have accidentally taken a series of photos with the time stamp or if yoy would simply like to remove to time stamp from your photos, follow these simple steps to photo editing your photo using Photoshop.

First, open the photo that has the time stamp in Photoshop, the industry standard photo editing software. Your photo and screen might look something like this:

As you can see, there is a very clear date stamp in the bottom left of the image. Luckily, it will be easy to edit the date stamp out of this image because the date is over a spot in the image that have a plain white background.

On the left artists palette, select the "Clone Stamp Tool." It will look like this:

The Clone Stamp tool allows you to copy a part of the image on top of the image that you would like to erase. In this case, you would want to copy part of the snow that does not have the date stamp and place it on top of the date stamp.

To use the tool for photo editing, click the ALT key as you simultaneously click your mouse over the part of the snow that you wish to clone. Next, move your mouse over the date.

As you can see in the image below, the cross or "+" sign marks the area that is being cloned and the circle marks the area that is, essentially, being masked by the clone. Simply drag that mouse over the entire area until the date is complete gone.

The end result will look something like this:

If you are dealing with more complicated photos where there is an image in the background or a pattern, you will have to work carefully to try to clone another part of the image that looks like the background underneath the date stamp.

Photoshop can help with all of your photo editing needs if you take the time to learn the software and understand its potential. After all, it is the industry standard photo editing system that is used by professionals around the world!

Freeware

Freeware is a software that is distributed freely without charge. It may have a big brother program which you can upgrade to for a charge but mostly they are great little stand alone programs.

Professional

If you want top be like a professional with a complicated program then GIMPShop is for you. GIMPShop is an open source replacement for Adobe Photoshop. It does a pretty good job of imitating Adobe Photoshop. A friend of mine who was a regular user of Photoshop found he adapted to it quite quickly. It has good features and runs well so my friend has not gone back and won't even if Photoshop were available free.

Simpler Version

I prefer a simpler program myself and have found the French program Photofiltre to be excellent. The free version does all I want and more and has many extras and add ons or plug ins that extend the effects available. (For 30 euros you can get a registered version with even more features called photofiltrestudio but the free version and free plug ins do everything I want.)

Organizing Images

Organizing photos is a breeze with the free IrfanView. IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista. It is simple for beginners and powerful for professionals. This program has a useful plug in for editing exif data with your jpeg images. It also has a free plug in for lossless rotation of jpegs. If you don't understand these then you don't need them!

Filtering Noise

Finally noise is something that makes photos less perfect than they can be. Noise isn't something you hear but speckles in what should be areas of pure color and they are common with the less expensive cameras and when taking pictures in poor light without flash. JPEG (.jpg) image compression doesn't save all the information in an image. It compresses images so consume only a small amount of disk space (e.g. compared with .bmp), but also damages them with a "blotchy look" and "JPEG artifacts". Most graphics editors have JPEG as a default format. And almost all digital photo cameras save images in JPEG format.

JpegEnhancer is a simple and extremely powerful program that lets you restore the images damaged by low-quality JPEG compression. It also is a free download.

Do It All For Free

So that is what I use - try it and see how you get on. And remember although I have safely downloaded and used all these programs it is VERY IMPORTANT to have good, up to date anti-virus software on your computer if you are going to download programs from the Internet.

There are two types of scanner that you may consider purchasing, a flatbed scanner or a film scanner. Undoubtedly the biggest differences between the two are price and intended use.

Flatbed scanners excel at scanning printed photographs and paper documents. Film scanners however scan only one medium-35mm film but they do it exceptionally well. So, if you have slides or negatives you want to scan then a film scanner will provide the best results. For photographs or documents, a flatbed scanner would be better.

Specific advantages of a flatbed scanner are the ability to scan a variety of media including photographs, documents and even three-dimensional objects. In addition some scanners have adapters that take film slides. They also have a significantly lower price than film scanners (a good quality model can come in at less than a £100).

For a film scanner the main benefits is the resolution of the image it provides (typically 2, 700 to 4, 000 dots per inch). The higher resolution provides more detail in the scanned image and, therefore, prints can be larger because of the higher quality.

Whichever you choose be sure to remove dust or hair from the photographs before you scan them. Handle film carefully by the edges because fingerprints will scan extremely well.