correctmyphotos

So far in this series of posts on Better eBay Sales with Better Photos I described the various photo shoot setups for photographing items for sale. I have been using my Stangl Bird collection as examples because they are representative of the items many people are selling on eBay and because I plan to start liquidating my bird collection. In fact, yesterday afternoon I photographed 20 birds using the light tent. I took about 5 or 6 shots of each of different views (side, back, front, base, etc.) so the potential buyer can see the characteristics, quality and flaws, if any, of the item.  As I look at other birds for sale on eBay I find that most of them are poorly presented and one would have difficultly deciding if they are worth buying.  If you have followed this series of posts you might recall the example I used in the first post comparing a bird photo I “borrowed” from an eBay listing with a photo I took of a similar bird in my collection. Here it is again, however, with a new photo I took using the light tent configuration with artificial lighting. 

Which Stangl Hummingbird would you buy?

UseMultiple Views for Greater Sales Impact
One of the benefits of digital photography is that you can easily take many shots of an item making it easier for the prospective buyer to make a buy decision. Taking mutiple photos of an object is real easy once you have the photo setup. Here is a composite of photos of the bird from different angles. (Note: the composite photo is for illustration only. You will want to show individual photos in your listing.)

Use Multiple Photos to Show Off Your eBay Listing

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Do you enjoy taking pictures with your digital camera but are disappointed that they don’t look as good as you thought they would?  There are, of course, many reasons for this. 

One is that we are not as careful “framing” a shot with our digital camera as we were when we were shooting film. Remember when you looked through a view finder to frame the shot? And, since the roll of film only had 24 or 36 exposures AND you had to pay for developing the film AND pay for prints you took your time to make sure the shot was a good one. (I use to drive my family nuts with the time I took to take a picture.) Now, we look at that little screen on the back of the camera while holding the camera a foot in front of our face and expect to get a great picture. Good Luck!

Then there are the issues of color, red eye, and exposure that are more prevalent in digital photography than when we shot with film. I won’t go into the reasons in this article, but most digital photos suffer from one or more of these issues.

You can make your digital photos look more professional with a photo editor.

Tiger Woods on the First Tee-Cropped and Color Corrected with CorrectPhoto

The good news is that with digital photos you have a chance to make photos look better. Or, putting it another way, we have a chance to fix our framing mistakes and the camera’s color and exposure problems.  All you need is a photo editor and a computer.  And, you really don’t have to do a lot of editing. All most photos need to make them look more professional is a little cropping and color correction and maybe a bit of sharpening.  In the photo above of Tiger Woods on the first tee at Hazeltine Golf Club in Minnesota a few years I cropped the golfers standing on the tee. Then I color corrected to get rid of the dull morning haze. Because of the tight crop I also sharpened the cropped photo.

Better Vacation Photos

You don’t get many “do overs” when you are on vacation. Normally, you don’t look closely at the photos until you get home and load them on your computer or have prints made. So, you can’t go back and take the photo again. But, in the digital world all is not lost. In the following example I cropped out the food partial food vendor from the photo of the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, MO, framed by the famous Arch-the Gateway to the Midwest.

St. Louis, MO Arch and Old Court House Cropped and Color Corrected

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Every Digital Photo Can Be Improved

If you have read previous posts in this blog you have heard my mantra before: “Every digital photo needs to be fixed.” Or, stated another way, “Every digital photo needs at least two fixes: cropping and color correction.” This past week I have been writing a script and assembling some example photos for a new promotional video for CorrectPhoto. As I was going through a bunch of my photos I was struck as to how true that mantra is. At least it is true for my photos and my guess it is true for yours, as well.  Some just require a little tweaking and some are worth tossing except there is a portion of the photo that is really good. So, I decided to share a few examples of how cropping and color correction can, in many cases, turn a so-so snapshot into a great shot–or at least make it much better.

Kathryn and her dog-Crop and color correction improves this photo

 Making Kathryn and her dog the focus of the photo turns this otherwise cluttered shot into a great photo. Make a print and give it to Nana to tape on her refrigerator.
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Heather finds a new tool for photography kit!
When Heather, a fellow Rotarian, sent me some photos she took at a recent Rotary event I was somewhat surprise at the quality of the photos. I knew she had an expensive digital camera (better than mine) but the color was really dull and like most digital photos needed a bit of cropping. When I mentioned this to Heather she sort of shrugged and admitted that she was disappointed in the photo quality, but really didn’t know what to do about it.  When I asked her if she had photo editing software she shrugged and said no and admitted that she really didn’t have the patience or time to learn a complicated editing program. So, I told her about CorrectPhoto (surprised?).  She tried it and here is what she had to say about her experience.

“Next to my camera, CorrectPhoto is the most useful tool in my photography kit.”
Heather V., Apple Valley, MN writes about her first experience with CorrectPhoto.

“I’ve got a few semesters of college training under my belt, an expensive camera (thanks, Husband!) and plenty of ambition. But for some reason, my photos never seem to turn out quite right. They’re too blue-ish or blurry, not bright enough or too contrast-y. I’ve thought about purchasing special software to help correct my digital snapshots, but was always intimidated by their price and complexity. Until I found PictoColor’s CorrectPhoto, that is.

OneClick Color Correction
One of the easiest, yet most useful, aspects of CorrectPhoto is one-click color correction. All I have to do is find something in the picture that is black, white or gray and click on it – the rest of the photo automatically adjusts to that color scheme. Brilliant. Check out the photo of when I met my new puppy for the first time; it was taken indoors with no flash, so it was very yellow. In CorrectPhoto, I clicked on my white hoodie and the rest of the photo was “fixed” to take out the weird tones. The photo still isn’t great (the dog kept squirming!), but the color is much more accurate now.

Philly (dog) and Heather-Before/After OneClick Color

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What will our Gourmet Group do with the photos?
Last weekend our gourmet group (a group of 4 couples– the guys are the chefs) went to one of the couple’s cabin in Spearfish Canyon, South Dakota. The theme of the meal we prepared on Saturday was Greek and it was, if I may so, outstanding and we had a great time. The floor of the canyon is 5000 feet above sea level so there was still a fair amount of snow around and the famous waterfall, Bridal Veil Falls, was frozen solid.  As usual, I am the one in the group that takes the most photos and I give a CD of edited photos to the other couples. Normally, I select the photos worth editing, crop to a 4×6 print format, color correct, and save the fixed photo. But then I remembered that Ron and Karlyn just bought a new super HDTV set and might enjoy viewing the photos in HDTV format. But, Dick and Hope will most likely want to get 4×6 prints made at Sam’s Club and I suspected Bill would just look at them his laptop and maybe send a few to their kids in Dallas. Or, he might pick one of the photos to create a “post card print” to put in the new 5×7 frame he and Mary Kay received as a hostess gift. So, what did I do?

Bridal Veil Falls, Before and After Color Correction, No Crop

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