Simple Tips to Edit your Photos
Use my jewelry photo editing tips to improve your own personal photos and photo projects!
In the realm of the digital age, it takes more then “sell, sell, sell” in order to grow a great side hustle and make it sizzle! In fact, as a shopper myself, I get turned off easily from businesses constantly running ads in my face and even smaller social media accounts always only selling to me. The more engaging profiles open a door to their lives, art, interests and make us feel like we can get to know the person behind the scenes of the digital profile. So I have been working on this too in my Instagram and Facebook groups, and you can expect more from me along these lines in the near future.
I had many reasons to start this jewelry blog. One was to introduce myself and my unique handmade jewelry to more people around the world and boost traffic to my website. But one of the ways I realized I could “add value” to my clients was to share things I’ve learned in the process of becoming a successful designer and side hustle owner/operator that you may benefit from.
Probably the most creative thing I do, outside of My Beading Art, is creating a photobook for my family each year. I really take a lot of time and use a ton of patience to design and layout each page. (I am a loyal Shutterfly client as I love the hybrid ability to start with templates and then go into advanced editing mode and then custom adjust them to suit the specific photos or layout I envision.) I feel photobooks are a great way to capture the highlights of each year and my kids will be able to look back on the amazing memories, cool things we did and special milestones captured each year. The books have already been reliable resources for confirming historical family “facts.” Unlike my best friend Natalie, who adds a ton of text details to her family photobooks, the focus of mine is more so on the visuals, so it’s particularly important for me that the photos look bright and crisp. (Another great photobook site she uses is Blurb, which is a Canadian site.)
As I take and edit all of my own photos of my handmade beaded jewelry, my eyes have become very attuned to shadows and colour errors and I’ve learned over the years, how to correct them fairly well. I therefore try to edit my photos before I upload and include them in my photobooks. Along with improved cellphone camera technology and my editing app skills, the quality of my newer photobooks is so much better than older ones. So here are some things I do that you can apply to your own photos…
Before you shoot:
lighting
background
angle
If you have the opportunity to give a bit of forethought to lighting, background and angle before you take the photos, it will make the process of editing much easier. Literally, less to edit. I’m not a professional photographer so I won’t go into specific camera settings, but there are lots of detailed videos on YouTube for that.
Outside, daytime light is ideal for great shots. Inside lighting can be okay too, but keep in mind many of us now have LED light fixtures and those can create strange stripped light patterns and change the colour tone in your photos, making something white appear too pink/blue or yellow. If there’s not enough light, white may look grey or dingy.
If there is bright sunlight at the time of the photo taking, make sure the stream of light is coming from behind the person taking the photo, don’t shoot into (or facing) the light, or you will get unnecessary shadows covering what you’re trying to capture. If you’re the one taking the photo, just ask your subject to spin around with you until the shadows disappear.
You may want to turn off LED lighting and boost the settings on your camera that allow more natural light into the photo, or move to a different room or spot.
If you’re photographing a person or object, a quick assessment could help you vastly improve the shot by removing messy objects from the background, lowering or raising how you frame your shot, or even changing your position in relation to your subject by a few steps one way or another. These quick in-the-moment changes can make a BIG difference and major improvement to the overall appearance of your photo.2. organize photos
Sort and move or copy the photos you want to use into one folder. You select and edit the photos one-by-one and it’s much easier to pull them up when you know where to find them and better when they’re all in the same place.
3. download free editing app
I love PicsArt (apple/android) as it is great for “fixing” photos and you can do all kinds of cool photo related things like collages and making graphics that start with a blank canvas or photo, and then adding photos, texts, stickers, etc.
4. edit tools
Now the fun, powerful taps start! This next section is specific to PicsArt, but very similar tools exist in other apps you may already have on your phone, so you can apply the same concepts there. The photos below start a few steps in… When you first open the app, tap the plus sign at the bottom and select a photo from your gallery. Now, (seen below) select “tools” from the menu, and then “adjust”. Now I’m going to give you a real brief idea of what the following tools do. All features work on a scale, increasing or decreasing the amount of that feature depending on which way you move it, left or right.
(Tap on these photos to expand.)
brightness - overall brightness equally in the photo
contrast - difference between the lightest and darkest points
clarity - definition
saturation - amount of colour
hue - I don’t ever touch this one! (Perhaps more of an artistic feature, it makes photos look unnatural)
highlights - specifically affects the whitist and brightest details
shadows - just what it sounds like!
temp - colour/color corrects lighting tone issues
I often use several of these tools for the same photo edit and sometimes the order in which you use them affects the outcome. If overall the photo is dark, try adjusting the brightness first. If that makes some parts of the photo great and a few spots too bright, then turn the highlights down.
If there are spots in your photo that look too grey, increase brightness and or highlights. If white looks to warm (yellow or pinkish) drag the temp scale to the left, making the colour tone cooler. If you have white spots that look too blue or green, go right (warmer) on the temp scale. (By the way, the temp feature is off screen in the third photo above. That menu slides to expand, so swipe left in your app, and temp will show up on the right side of highlights and shadows.)
If your overall brightness seems okay but some of the details in your photo are too dark, experiment with the shadows feature and then either highlights or contrast. It takes some experimenting with the tools until you get the hang of it and then it becomes very quick and easy.
If you are editing for a family photo album or something similar, I recommend you don’t crop the size while editing as sometimes that can limit you’re ability (or make it more difficult) to use photos in a page template. The page designs contain specific photo shapes that are either vertical, horizontal or square. So if you have a photo with extra space around the subject, you’ll be able to drop it into a photo template and then drag or zoom to adjust it. But that is harder to do, especially if you’re not familiar with advance editing in the photobook programs, if you drop a tightly cropped square photo into a vertical or horizontal photo template.
Even if you are just sending a photo to print, the same concept applies. You usually have the ability to zoom in and drag to adjust when you select the size to print. So cropping before you know exactly how and where you will use the image just limits your creativity too soon and unnecessarily.
If you have any questions, post them below or reach out to me by email or on social media! xo Hedy
P.S. If you just found my blog, you can check out my jewelry by tapping the SHOP button below!
