Editing... how to make a good photo better or a better photo awesome.

I highly recommend editing your photo's. You can easily make a good photo better. It isn't hard. There are many different free online editors you can use. I was a Picnik fan until it closed so I have found that Ribbet works the best for me as it is the closest fit to Picnik and was made by former Picnik employees.

Whatever service you choose you need to learn what the different things can do for you in the program.

We are going to work with this photo. This is the original unedited photo.

Tool #1. Crop Crop is a great way to change the position of your subject in the photo. I am going to crop this photo into a square Instagram shape. 

Crop brought us all a bit closer to the front, took out extra background. 

Tool #2 is Rotate. You would use this if you needed to straighten the photo because you might have held your camera a bit crooked or you need to turn it because you held the camera perpendicular. I am going to change our position just for fun. I think we shall tilt a bit.

This photo didn't have a ton of background so the rotate really did not help much but you can see how we took the same photo and tilted it.  (cropped first)

Tool #3 Exposure You can use Exposure to fix the lighting to a degree. It can brighten the photo and correct the white to white. If you notice all the white in the original isn't true white. 

Here I used auto Exposure. And the whites look whiter. It brightened it all up.

Manual Exposure used here. I put the highlight up to 41 and the shadow to 10. Went a bit high on the highlight just so you can see the extreme. 

Tool #4 Sharpen. Honestly I don't often touch this. I can give your photo a grainy texture. Sometimes that is desired because it will make a digital photo have more of a film quality. Feel free to experiment as you wish,

Tool #5  Resize. This is useful when the size of your photo is too large. Not shape size but pixel size. If you have a higher megapixel camera you end up with higher pixel count . Often higher pixel count is desired, It views the best on blogs for example.

Tool #6 Autofix. It will fix color and straighten.  Here is the same photo with auto fix. 

Tool #7 Colors. I typically use the neutral color and click on white in the photo. That is why I favor white shirts or white walls. It allows you to fix color. 

Combining the tools... I am going to use a few of these tools to make the original photo what I would like it to be. I will tell you what I used. 

Here we have white whites, bright faces and not too much background. 

You can experiment with filters, text, stickers, frames, and effects to customize your photo further. It is always a good idea to watermark your photos with your name so no one steals your work on the internet. I left this without one, but it is not the most thrilling photo of Beth, Candace and myself. Also Beth and Candace are customs so it is harder to steal photo's of custom dolls. 

Keep shooting photos and practicing your art, and I will be back soon with more lessons for you.