28 July 2014

Krafty Tips & Tutes - Week #28 - Photographing Your Creations!




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! 

This week our hostess is Krafty Girl, TANGII!!  And she's prepared a fantastic step by step tutorial on PHOTOGRAPHING your beautiful creation!! Enjoy the tutorial and then put it into action by working on your photo skills and sharing your cards featuring  Kraftin' Kimmie Stamps  in our brand new KKS Krafty Friends group on Facebook!!!  Come on over and join us to keep up with all the latest at KKS, share your krafty creations and just hang out!!



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!

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