Tuesday, May 1, 2018

PAGE PHOTO EDITING

It's time to share a few of my April pocket pages. Since Swedish customs are making my kits arrive very late I've been forced to save the cork months for next year. I have a few of the rubber months from last year saved up though, so I'll be using those when I can. 

I'm still trying my best to include more colors in each spread. It's so easy for me to get stuck in a twotone rut. My favorite trick for mixing colors on a spread is to find one card that ties the other colors together, like the middle floral card below.


The next page is dedicated to our new baby cousin. Both kids, but especially our son, is crazy for babies so they're in heaven right now. Big sister also had her second birthday that we celebrated with everything Pippi Longstocking. 

The yellow letter stickers in the Bookmarked kit are my favorite font. I love when we get these stickers in the kit. They're big enough to use as an embellishment on their own, and the bright yellow color is perfect. 


April has been unusually dry and sunny this year. We could really use a bit of rain now to turn the grass green again. Here's a super simple page that sums up the things I did during our week off school over Easter.

In yesterday's blog post I promised to share how I photograph and edit my pocket pages for posting them online. I use my iPhone 7 for photographing the pages and I feel that's good enough for me. To prevent glare I place the cards and photos on top of the page protector. I use a small white sidetable for my background. The table is small enough to be moved to wherever the best lighting is. Try to get your lighting as white as possible. A very overcast day will tint your photos blue, and if it's too late in the day your photos turn yellow. Most often I wait for the perfect day and time and take photos in batches. Take your photos directly from above and as close up as you can. You want your full page to be a perfect rectangle in the picture. I like taking a few closeup shots as well, and I prefer those photos to be angled, as you can see here.


After uploading my images I open up my favorite shots in PSE. All I do there is to slightly brighten the image, just to make the whites whiter, and crop it to 1019 pixels wide. If that seems like an odd number it's because that's the requested width for Big Picture Class photos. If I ever want to use a photo in a class I don't have to re-edit it. 

After cropping and brightening the image in PSE I head over to Picmonkey for further editing. I realize I could do all my editing in PSE but Picmonkey is so easy to use! In the "Basic edits" section I click "Colors" and then "Neutral picker", then click on something white in the photo. If you had a blue or yellow tint in your image it should now be gone. If it's not, click on another white spot until you're satisfied with the colors in your image. 

My next step is to up the saturation just a tiny bit. I then click "Sharpen" and up both sharpness and clarity a little. On any of these tweaks I rarely go above 4/100. For my full page photos I like to go into the "Frames" section and add a drop shadow. I like how that looks, but it's really just a matter of taste. Add it in if you like! Here's a look at the full page image as it was, straight off my phone: 


And here is the edited version:


It really does make a difference, and make the photos look much more professional. 

Happy scrapping friends! /Magdalena





2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the tips... it does look better but even your original version looks better than mine, LOL I just can't seem to get the lighting right! Ugh!

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    1. The lighting has so much to do with the time of day! Natural sunlight, preferably not direct, as close to noon as possible. That should work!

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