Wednesday 22 July 2015

How To Edit 'Amazing' Blog Photos


After posting my ' 50 quick blogging tips' post, which you can read HERE- if you missed it
I mentioned, doing a post about editing software, in particular free pieces of editing software. 
You guys really seemed to want to see this post, so of course, I was going to stand by my word and do it for you. 




( Side note- I don't think all my photos are ' amazing' it just wouldn't make a very interesting blog title, if it was called ' How to edit some half decent blog photos'  would it?! :) )


For my blog photos, I use Picasa 3. This is a free bit of editing software that is honestly so good, and takes literally seconds to install. 


Just type in to your search engine of choice- picasa 


Click the one at the top 

Then click either mac or windows and follow the instructions through from there. It takes no time at all to download and its 100% free.

What can I do with it? ( I hear you ask) well I'm going to show you a before and after comparison


This is the photo I am going to be starting with and showing you how I edit it. 


As you can see, there is a lot of excess space around the edge of the photograph- so I need to crop it out. You can do this, simply by going to crop.


Whats really good about the crop feature, is you can select one of the crop features it gives you or click the drop-down menu. This comes in particularly handy, when you need to have a certain size photograph, I use this feature a lot for competitions.   


Still on the first tab, you can play around with the basic editing features, such as auto contrast and auto colour. I went down to the little slide button, called fill light- which makes it brighter. Another excellent feature about this software, is if you make a mistake you can simply click the undo feature. 


I then used ' I'm feeling lucky' button. This basically adjusts the levels, lighting and colour for you. It can be hit and miss. Sometimes it works great and other times it gets a bit excited and goes a bit over the top, so its better if you adjust it manually. 


Moving on to the next tab you can adjust the light, highlight and shadows. Because they are little bars, its really easy to move and adjust them and move back if you went too far.


I like to adjust the saturation on my photos to make them brighter and more eye catching. If you go to far, this can mean your photo will lose quality. So the better the quality in the first place, the more you can increase the saturation. There is so many amazing filters and effects you can use, if you want to experiment or are doing digital art.  


When saving, always remember to save as a copy not just save because it will overwrite your original photo.
And this is the final photo, 




I hope you guys found this helpful and interesting. I can definitely make a post about how I edit my Instagram photos, because I use a different piece of software and I can also make a post called ' how to take amazing blog photos' or something like that, if you guys want to see it, Including things like composition,  lighting etc. 

Thanks for reading x

Let me know if you have this software, or are thinking of downloading it




* Life is short, chose happiness*


    
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