correctmyphotos

Seasons Greetings From PictoColor

Creating holiday greeting cards is easy and fast with CorrectPhoto and ImageTitler. Yesterday, we woke up to 10 inches of new fluffy snow in Burnsville, MN—a perfect time to take a photo and create a greeting card. After transferring the photo to my computer I used CorrectPhoto Editor to crop and color correct it and then added the greeting text with ImageTitler. Here is a step-by-step tutorial you can follow to create your own greeting cards.

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 3×4 cropping format. I chose not to center the ornament so I could add the greeting on the left side of the photo. Using the OneClick color correction feature I clicked on the white and I was done.

CorrectPhoto Editor is an easy way to crop and color correct photos

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 Text and Titles to Photos with ImageTitler

After opening ImageTitler I selected the edited ornament photo and typed in the text I wanted. I then adjusted the text size and moved the text to the location I wanted using the arrow buttons. I then selected the type fonts from the pull down menu to see which one I liked best. After quickly going through the list of 12 available fonts I settled on Century with the Bold and Italics option. The whole process only took a couple of minutes and I was finished with our new greeting card. The quality of the text on the photo is really sharp and crisp and will print quite nicely or used on our websites.

Be Creative
My friend Dick and his wife Joan often send a photo of themselves with their grandchildren. Dick is the software developer that created PictoColor’s CorrectPhoto and ImageTitler and this year he used both to add a creative touch to their annual greeting photo card. The front of the card is the color photo and on the back he created a second version of the photo in Black & White with CorrectPhoto’s OneClick B&W feature and employed a creative use of ImageTitler to identify the ages and parents names to each of the grandchildren. Granted, it did require multiple passes with ImageTitler to add all of the names, but it was still quite fast and easy. And, with the high quality jpeg compression built into ImageTitler the quality of the B&W photo was still quite good.

Be Creative with CorrectPhoto and ImageTitler

Take the time to create your own greeting card.
If you plan to send a photo greeting card or including a photo with your card I suggest you take a few minutes editing and titling the photo. If you are like us you display the cards and photos you receive during the holidays. Most of the photos end up on our refrigerator door and are seen by our holiday guests. Quite often someone will ask, “Who is this?” So, why not add your name to the photo and answer the question before it is asked? Also, most of the photos tend to be dull and lifeless because, a common characteristic of digital camera photos. As I have discussed many times that is a problem that is easy to fix. It is simple and fast to create a photo greeting card you will be proud to send. All it takes is a little time and the right tools.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Wayne  www.correctphoto.com

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.

(continue reading…)

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

(continue reading…)

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

(continue reading…)

Why are real estate photos on the Internet so dull and lifeless? Because realtors skip an important step–fixing the photo.
I had wondered why the online real estate photos were so bad so I asked my friend Barb, a realtor in the Twin Cities area, to lead me through the process she follows after she lands a new listing.  With signed contract in hand she takes her trusty digital camera and takes the photos she will use to list the property on the online MLS service and for “sell sheets”. Once back at her office she downloads the files to her computer, selects the ones she wants to display and uploads them (full resolution) to the Northstar MLS service.

So, what step did she miss? You guessed it! She didn’t fix them. If you have followed my blog you will know my mantra, “Every photo needs to be cropped and color corrected.”  So, why didn’t Barb take that extra step? Would it take too much time? Did she know how?” Nobody does it.  Didn’t she care?

Knowing Barb there was little doubt that she cares. She is a professional and really does want to show off her properties in the best way possible. I saw that from the sell sheets she had printed by a professional printer (who fixed the photos before printing). But, she just didn’t know how to do it and didn’t want to take the time to learn and use a complicated photo editing software program.

This photo was cropped, color corrected, and resized before uploading

Crop, Correct Color, and Resize Before Uploading to MLS
Barb was concerned that the front veiw of a recent listing was dull and fuzzy so I took the original file image and opened it in CorrectPhoto, cropped it to get rid of the front of the car and driveway and color corrected it with OneClick.  And, the picture was sharp but so was the original photo. So why was it fuzzy on the MLS site? I suspected the answer-the scaling algorithm on the MLS site wasn’t very good and it turned out I was right. So, before uploading I resized the corrected photo to 640×480 and you can see the result. Unfortunately, I don’t have the orginal to show a comparison, but trust me this one is a lot better. I took another one of the photos from the listing and simply color corrected it and here is the comparison.

Real Estate Photos Need to be Color Corrected

In summary, every real estate photo needs the following before uploading to the MLS Service:  1. Cropped, 2. Color Corrected, 3. Resized. 

If you know how to use Photoshop Elements you may certainly use it, however, I would suggest getting  PictoColor’s iCorrect OneClick Plug-in for the color correction. My preference (of course) is CorrectPhoto because it is the easiest for most of us to use and has OneClick Color built in. It took me about 45 seconds to crop, color correct, and resize the house picture.

If you are a realtor I would recommend you take the time to fix the photo before you upload.  In today’s market you need to show off your listings to attract potential buyers. If you are not a realtor tell them how to make their listings better. They will thank you for the tip.

You can bet that Barb’s listings from now on are going to have the best photos of all her collegues. That is until they decide to take a few minutes to fix their photos.

Wayne http://correctphoto.com/CorrectPhoto_Realtor.htm