Great Product Photos on a Budget Series, #3--Editing Your Photos

UPDATED!  Anything between ** is an updated portion of this tutorial!

So you've made your light box, learned your camera's settings, and taken your photos.  The next step is to edit those photos.  It will be very rare that a product photo will not need editing.  If yours don't...congratulations!  You are an expert at the previous steps!  But for the rest of us, this is where an editing program comes in.  While an expensive program like Adobe Photoshop is ideal, most of us artists and crafters cannot afford it!  The program I recommend is Google's Picasa.  It is free, downloads to your computer, and is easy to use. If you are not able to (or choose not to!) use this particular program for any reason (i.e. you have a Mac or another editing program), this tutorial will still be helpful.  Just skip down to #3 and ignore any program specific directions. 

First you must download the program. 

1.  Go to http://picasa.google.com/ and click download Picasa.  This program is compatible with XP/Vista/Windows 7.  I don't think it's compatible with Mac.  Follow all the directions for installation.

2.  Once installed, whenever you open a photo, the Picasa photo viewer should come up, and there should be a button at the bottom of your screen that says "Edit in Picasa".  Clicking this will open Picasa and bring you directly to editing that particular photo.

3.  The first thing I do to my photos is crop them.  In Picasa the crop tool is located under the wrench icon in the upper left corner.  Crop out any unnecessary background or other items by dragging the sides and/or corners of the image.  In Picasa you can always preview before cropping.  For product photos I recommend most of your pictures show the entire item, except for close-ups to show texture, etc.  You should have at least 1 of those. Remember you can always undo anything, so don't be afraid to try different crops!

4.  Next on the to-do list is to edit the brightness and contrast.  The brightness of an image is basically, well, the overall brightness.  Contrast is how much difference between the lights and darks there is in your image.  A low-contrast image will appear flat.  In Picasa, and many other programs, have an automatic contrast button, or the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.  Do not use this!  It never seems to get it right, especially Picasa's. Well, I guess you can try it...I always do...but don't settle on it if it's not right. You really should adjust your contrast manually.  In Picasa, you can tweak brightness and contrast by the fill light, highlights, and shadows bars.  These are located under the tab with the half black, half white "sun" image in the upper left corner.  What I normally do is first adjust the fill light, which bumps up the overall brightness (pull the slider to the right).  You will adjust this quite drastically depending on your starting image.  Adjust it to and just past what you think is too bright.  You will balance this out with the shadows in a second.  After fill light, adjust the highlights so that your lightest areas on your photo are pure white.  Then adjust the shadows until the darkest areas of your image are stark black.  You know your image has good contrast when the values (amount of light or dark) show a range from blackest black to whitest white.  After making all adjustments you can always go back and adjust anything as needed.  And if you have multiple similar photos, you can go up to the edit menu, click copy all effects (this does not include cropping, retouch, etc), move to the next photos, and click edit--paste all effects. 

5.  The next step is to adjust the color temperature if needed...if the color of the item in the photo does not match its actual color.  **Update:  I have found that using Picasa's auto color button works fairly well.  Try this first.  But if the photo doesn't show close to the color of your item, undo the auto color and adjust manually**  Use this sparingly!  In Picasa, this is a slider located under the shadows bar.  If your image needs to be slightly more red or orange, pull the slider (only slightly!) to the right.  If it needs more blue, pull to the left.  I cannot stress enough that this adjustment should only be used when really needed, and then only very slightly.  If you find that you just cannot get the color right with this, go back and retake your photo.  **Often just using slightly different lighting or a different setting on your camera is enough.** 

6.  If your image has any icky spots, you can use the retouch button (located under the wrench again) to take those out.  Please do not use this to change anything on your actual item, as this will misrepresent it to buyers. But use it for unintended spots on the photo, like dirt on the background or a speck of dust on the camera lens.  When using this, set the brush size with the slider to the smallest size you can get that still covers the spot to retouch.  Click on the spot, move the brush to a spot with similar color and value (usually an area right next to the spot), and click again.  It should magically disappear! 

7.  The last adjustment I will discuss is the text button.  One reason you would use this is because your items are hand made and you wish to add your name to the photos for copyright purposes.  Using Picasa is a down-side in this regard because you cannot use layers like in Photoshop to add your signature to your photos, and you don't have access to 100s of fonts and text colors, but you can still add text.  Click the text button (under the wrench icon), click anywhere on the photo, and type.  You can adjust the text color, font, size, etc in the upper left corner.  If you want to move your text around after applying it, you can just click on the lettering.  You can also tilt it by clicking on it and dragging the white circle with the red dot in the middle.  If you want to have multiple formats to your text, there is a process with multiple text boxes.  For example, on my photos I wanted to write my business name, Erika with a K Designs, and have the "E" and the "K" be large, the "rika" be smaller, and so on.  To do this I clicked the text button, clicked where I wanted the text to be, typed "E", formatted it to the font, size, and color I wanted it, and then clicked apply.  Then I repeated this for each section of my text.  And if putting text on multiple images, you can go up to the edit menu and click copy text, move to the next photo, and click edit--paste text. 

There you have it!  These few adjustments are usually all I use for my photos.  Picasa has lots more to offer by the way of fixes and image processing, but I don't recommend using any of the processing techniques as they may misrepresent the color of your item. 

Editing your photos correctly takes practice.  Just remember this is a learning process and that you can always use the undo button!