Editing Blog Photos

I thought I would continue my blogging tips posts with a post about how I edit my blog photos, because I rarely put an unedited photo out for the world to see. During winter especially, everything is quite dark so more than ever editing is required. so I thought I'd take you through my editing process.

I took a photo of my L'Oreal True Match Foundation to edit especially for this post. Now I don't use a fancy camera to take my photos, I use my phone, either iPhone 5C or Moto G, (depending whether I remembered to charge them depends which I use.) For this post I used my iPhone 5C. Also, I use a free online photo editor in PicMonkey which is easy to use and accessible from any computer with Internet access.

Now the first thing I always do to my photos is to adjust the exposure. For me changing the brightness is a necessity, my room isn't the brightest so the image needs brightening which I adjust by + 15. I then move onto to highlights and shadows; the highlight essentially brightens any light patches in the photo so I + 10, the shadows are the darker areas and I - 5 so the image still shows depth. Finally I adjust the contrast, not by loads, around + 5 just enough to make a difference.

Once I've adjusted the exposure I move onto colours, now I don't tend to touch the saturation, however, I do adjust the temperature to make it look more life like. For instance in swatch photos my camera doesn't always show the colour true to life so changing the temperature can help show the true colours. I usually like to adjust by + 5.

My final step is to sharpen the image but + 1 or 2, the images don't need excessive sharpening, just enough to make sure the label can be read easily.

Here is the final image, I've included both before and after so you are able to clearly see the differences, for one the brighter nature. Hopefully this post will help you if you were looking for tips!