Welcome to another week of Krafty Tips and Tutes here at Kraftin' Kimmie Stamps! Each week one of our fabulous Krafty Girls share a little post with some sort of tip or tutorial for you and we hope you find them inspirational!
Hey y'all, this is Tangii and for this
week’s Krafty Tip’s & Tutes, we’re gonna talk a little about taking
pictures of your beautiful cards!
LIGHTING: First off, good lighting is
KEY, but even if you don’t have a “photo box” (which I don’t) you can still
take great pictures! I have NEVER gotten
a good picture when using a flash so natural light has always worked best for
me. I actually 2 large windows in my
loft, and when the curtains are open I get some great natural light in there,
be sure the windows aren’t behind your photo.
If you absolutely have to take pics at night (cause ya know, some of us,
I mean some peeps, work at the last minute on things, lol), take them in your
bathroom or possibly kitchen… in most houses both of those rooms provide great
lighting (though not natural). On
overcast days when natural light in the loft is bad, or when it’s too late in
the afternoon and the sun is shining through, I’ll go outside and take a
picture in a shaded area. Sunlight will
tend to give your pictures a washed out look.
POSITIONING: Stand those cards up! I’ve never gotten a good photo with it laying
on the table… for me, the angle is always wrong. If you don’t like the angle they stand at,
lean them against something (something photo-worthy, aka nice looking).
I
have a small photo Easel I use, now mine is ugly, but it doesn’t matter because
most of it doesn’t show.
EDITTING
THOSE PHOTOS:
I use 2 free software programs to edit my photo’s. The first is picmonkey.com, I use this one to fix the
colors and sharpness of my photo. This
is actually a website, not something you download. The second one I use is GIMP,
and this is a free download, I use GIMP for putting a frame around my photo and
for adding my watermarks.
Let’s do some playing with PICMONKEY first…
First you’ll click on EDIT (see arrow above), this will allow you to select the photo
from your computer. I’ve selected a
photo that has already been watermarked, etc but you will want to do this
editing before adding your watermark just so you don’t mess with the watermark J. I’m going to keep this
super easy here. So first I’ll play with
the COLORS tab…
When you click on the COLORS tab to the
left, it’ll “drop down” and give you more options. Now 99.9% of the time all I need to play with
is NEUTRAL PICKER.
Once you click on this button your curser
will turn in to an “eye dropper” looking thing.
Place this over some white or gray space on your card or background and
click (on the white/gray space) and PM will adjust the colors for you! If you like what it did, click apply on the
left… changes made aren’t saved until you click APPLY. You could also try AUTO ADJUST here or play
with the SATURATION & TEMPERATURE sliders.
Once you click APPLY the COLORS tab will collapse again. Now let’s get
that photo crisp and sharp (this is my favorite part!).
Now here you can just use the CLARITY and
SHARPNESS sliders to adjust until your picture looks perfect! Sometimes my picture is a little small for me
to tell if the details are “right”, so if you’ll look in the lower right hand
corner you’ll see a ZOOM slider (right now it’s set to 54%). Click APPLY when you like what you see and
then save your image! There is so much
more you can do with PICMONKEY, but I promised to keep it simple so feel free
to play and experiment on your own!
Now, I’ve not added how I do my watermarks,
though if you are interested, I certainly could… just give a holla, lol. Also, I’ll be stalking the Kraftin' Kimmie Stamps Friends FB Page as well as
the comments area on this post so if you have ANY questions, please let me know
and I’ll try to answer them for ya!
Fantastic tips! Thank you so much for sharing!
ReplyDeleteAwesome post! Thanks for the great tips! ☺
ReplyDelete