Weavie Business || How to Edit Your Photos

Do you remember my post about my 6 rules for taking better pictures of your weaves? In that post I showed you how you can take better pictures, even if you’re using your phone to take them. Well today I’m going to share how you can take those pictures and edit them with an app on your phone. Photo editing is important because even when you do your best to get perfect lighting and a really great photo, there are a lot of minor factors that can change how your product looks. The goal with editing is to make your product (your weave) look as great as it does in real life.

I’m going to share with you two different apps that you can edit with, but there are many more then just these two and if you find an app you like that has similar features then you can follow along on that app too. Also there is a lot you can do with the editing tools out there that I don’t know everything about, but I’ll share with you what I do know and what works for me! Remember each picture is different, so play around with your tool settings to get the perfect editing for that picture.

Edit Using Instagram

The first app I’ll show you is the Instagram app. A lot of people use this application to share their pictures so it’s set up to help you make your pictures their best. (By the way are we friends on there yet?)

step 1| I think a lot of users go to the filters and select what they like, but for us we’re going to click on the Edit option at the bottom.

step 2| A nice bright picture is what a lot of people love, so the first option I select is Brightness. As each picture is different there is no exact number that I can give you to improve your picture’s brightness. Play with the slider and determine what number makes your photo looks it’s best. Make sure to keep an eye on white and light colors, you don’t want to over due the brightness so that these colors become blown out and all detail is lost. Hit Done when you are happy with your brightness level.

step 3| Next I selected Warmth in the editing options. For this editing tool, think of it as a sink. The left side is the cold tones or blue and the right side is the warm tones or red. What you change this setting to, again will depend on the picture you have taken. If you look at my original picture, you can see the white background has a really yellow tone to it, so this is too warm. I pulled the slider to the left to cool down the tone of the picture and make the white background a cleaner white.

step 4| I then selected Saturation. The left side of this slider will dull your picture’s colors all the way to black and white. The right side will saturate your colors all the way to a really intense level. But play around with this and see where your picture looks best. I like bump the slider to the right a bit, but a little goes a long way here so I try not to do too much. I also keep the colors as close to the real life version as possible, because obviously you want the picture to represent your weave.

step 5| The next feature I use is the Sharpen tool. This tool helps bring out the details, so for a weave it helps show the texture. For this tool I also just apply it slightly, because it can possibly make your picture too dirty and static looking.

step 6| And now I’m done. There are other tools also available to you in the Instagram app, but these are the ones I use regularly.

Edit Using A Color Story

I really love the A Color Story app. It’s created by the same ladies from A Beautiful Mess blog, so you know it’s made with design in mind. The basic app is free and although there are in-app purchases, everything you need to photo edit is in the basic package. I’ll walk you through this app next, but before I start I wanted to talk about why I like it so much. For starters it won’t crop your photo down to a square like Instagram does, and it will let you save your photo once you are finished. You’ll end up with a beautiful .jpg file that you can use on other places like your Etsy store or blog or even on Instagram. Also this app has features that really let you get a nice picture output (I like the edited picture from this app much better then the one I got from editing with Instragram). Alright so here are the steps:

step 1| In the app select TOOLS and then ADJUST and you’ll see all the different photo editing options.

step 2| I first started with adjusting my EXPOSURE, moving the slider to the left will darken the photo and moving it to the right will brighten it. This tool mimics how much light is let into a camera. Make sure not to go crazy with this tool, if you bring in too much light you’ll lose details.

step 3| Next I selected TINT. This tool is a balance between green (the left side) and purple (the right side). If you look to my white background you can see it has a bit of a green tint to it, causing it to not look like a very clean white. Pulling the slider to the right helps take some of the green out, bringing me closer to white.

step 4| Now that I fixed my tint, I selected TEMP. This is the cold vs. warm colors. If you look at my white background it has a very warm pink/yellow tone to it. Using the slider I brought the tones down towards the blue side to clean my white up even more.

step 5| CLARITY is the next option I selected, this brings the details back into your picture.

step 6| CURVES is the final tool I used. This one is tools contains the ability to adjust tones, adjust colors, brighten or darken…pretty much everything. And even though I have a lot to learn about it, I still can play around with the curve slider to make my final adjustments. I’m assuming that someone who understands curves better can just go straight to this tool and make all their adjustments at once. But for me I like to put the final touch on my picture after I have made my initial adjustments, at least for now. My advice for this tool is to play around with the slider and options, take it to the extremes and see what happens, you can always ‘x’ out the curve changes and start over with your photo.

Do you manually edit your photos already? If so what software do you use? Or do you normally select a filter that you like best? I would love to hear if this post has helped you.

Happy Weaving!

Kate

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