correctmyphotos

Why not turn your average snapshots into great photos?  All it takes is a little photo editing.  Here is a video promoting PictoColor’s CorrectPhoto Editor that includes some excellent examples of what cropping and color correction can do to make your mediocre photos outstanding.

You can find out more about photo editing and how easy it is at www.correctphoto.com.

Wayne,  www.correctphoto.com

Merry Christmas Greeting

Earlier this week we woke up to 7 inches of new snow in Burnsville, MN. This was our first real snow this winter and while it created a miserable commute for many it certainly help put us in the holiday mood. And, of course, I couldn’t resist taking a few photos of our house which I recently decorated for the season and creating a greeting card. I wrote about creating greeting cards a couple of weeks ago so I won’t go into detail in this post. Of course I used CorrectPhoto and ImageTitler to quickly edit the photo and add the text. Here is another card using a different shot of the house.

Christmas card greeting created with CorrectPhoto and ImageTitler

 As I have said many times, virtually all digital photos need to be cropped, color corrected and this is particularly true of photos you might want to use for a greeting card.  The above greeting card examples are no exception.  Both need to be cropped and color corrected and here is the before and after of the above house photo. Note how dull and lifeless the original photo is. I took the photos on a cloudy morning and the color is typical of snow photos taken under those conditions. But, as you can see, they can be easily turned into a good looking photo with a photo editor like CorrectPhoto or Photoshop Elements.

House photo was cropped and color corrected with CorrectPhoto

The greeting text was added with ImageTitler.

Add greeting text to photo with ImageTitler

 Why not use one of your photos to create a unique greeting card to send to your friends this holiday season. It is easy and fun to do and anyone can do it.

I hope you have a wonderful holiday season.

Wayne www.correctphoto.com

Happy Holidays from Dickens
You can create your own holiday greeting cards in a few short minutes. Well, maybe we’ll start the timer after you decide on the photo you want to use. That might take a bit longer. For this example I chose a photo I took of Dickens last Christmas wearing his Santa outfit. (He really wasn’t crazy about wearing it, but was a good sport about it.)

Create your own greeting card-Dicken's had some help creating his

 Step 1-Edit the photo
As I have said many times, every photo needs to be cropped and color corrected and this shot is no exception. I used CorrectPhoto to crop the photo using the 4×6 cropping format. I chose not to center Dickens so I could add the greeting on the right side of the photo. Using the OneClick color correction feature I clicked on the white portion of his hat and I was done.

Crop and color correct the photo-I used CorrectPhoto Editor

Step 2-Add Greeting Text to Photo
To add the text I used PictoColor’s ImageTitler because it is so simple (I still have difficulty using Photoshop Elements to add text to photos and it takes too long.)

Add Titles and Text to Photos with ImageTitler by PictoColor

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USA 15 Star Flag Flying over Floyd’s Monument, Sioux City, IA.

15 Star Flag at Floyd Monument, Sioux City, IA

This past weekend my wife and I took a little road trip from Minneapolis to Sioux Falls, SD by way of Sioux City, IA (Nebraska and SD).  Why? Well, when our trip to a friend’s cabin in Spearfish Canyon, SD was cancelled we decided to take a couple of days and see the eastern part of South Dakota. And, another friend suggested we go to Sioux City where South Dakota, Iowa, and Nebraska join.  So we did and that is where we learned about Sergeant Charles Floyd. Don’t feel bad if you don’t know who he is. No one I ask, even those who grew up in SD and IA, know who he is either.

Sergeant Floyd’s Claim to Fame—He Died!
That’s right. Sergeant Floyd’s claim to fame is that he was the only person to die on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Quite remarkable that only one person died on that famous trip across the US. Here is a link if you are interested in learning more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Floyd_(explorer)

The 15 Star Flag—The Digital Photo Lesson
The flag flying over Floyd’s Monument has 15 stars representing the 15 states comprising the US when Thomas Jefferson commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition.  Trying to capture the flag to show all of the stars turned out to be a challenge, however. But, as I have said before, one of the benefits of a digital camera is that you can take lots of shots to get a usable one. This is the best of about 10 shots I took.  Even with the multiple shots I still needed to edit the photo with CorrectPhoto. Here is a before and after comparison.

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Sometimes you just have to see better color to know.
The other day our Rotary Club  cooked 250 hot dogs for the Burnsville Kids of Summer program’s final day, a project we have done for about 20years. Heather and I took a few photos of the event. When I got back to the office I edited a few with CorrectPhoto and sent them to Heather for our clubs website. She went back to her office and uploaded a few of my photos with a few of hers. (Heather is the editor of our club’s website.) Now Heather does have CorrectPhoto and loves it, however, she has it on her home computer and not on her office computer so she bypassed the photo editing step and uploaded uncorrected photos. (Sound familiar?) When I saw the photo gallery of the event I mentioned to my friend Bill and mentioned the fact that Heather hadn’t had time to color correct her photos. His comment was, “Only you would know that?” That is really not true, but it did get me to thinking about how does one really know the color is not right? I guess the reality is that most people just accept the color they get from their digital camera and don’t realize that the color could be better. So, do you think the color is right or okay in the following photo?

Is the Color Right? Look at the mustard bottle and the girls shirt.

Now compare it with this photo. Now, doesn’t the original photo look dull and lifeless compared with the color corrected one?

Look at the mustard bottle and the girl's shirt to see the difference in color

Do you need to see the photos side by side to tell the difference? (continue reading…)