Hello there

I know that I normally write about my cardmaking and scrapbooking but today I want to show you what a difference editing your photos make.  I normally am a purist about photography and do minimal editing such as cropping for photos but today I went a little further and I am sold on editing to get a good photo now.  What do you think of the results?

I used to use Memory Manager from Creative Memories, but I bought a new computer and I am now no longer able to use it for editing as the programme is no longer being supported since the demise of CM Australasia.  So I have discovered Picmonkey which is free for basic editing and just $33 per year for the Royale feature.  I have found it great to use to do collages for a website that  I am setting up for Gift Hutt.

For those of you that don’t know, I also have a shop in Lower Hutt called Gift Hutt and sell lots of arts and crafts on behalf of people.  You can check out what I have  in the shop here.  Today when I got to Gift Hutt the sun was shining through the window, onto some polymer clay orchids that I had sitting in the front of the shop and that was creating a lovely reflection.  I took a few photos with my Samsung Note tablet – here is the original image:

As you can see there is quite a lot of background distraction.  I then cropped the photo to focus on the flowers and then using the clone function removed the white mark on the right.  Finally I used the shadow function to remove the background noise from the wall at the back of the photo.  It didn’t take long but I am happy with the result.  Here is the finished photo again:

As you can see the editing has made a huge difference.  I know a lot of people are probably already doing this but it is a revelation to me and I am so pleased with the results that I will be doing more of this to improve the quality of my photos.  I will be exploring the other functions to see what results I come up with – so watch this space…

Happy Crafting

Patricia