Image editing is an important part of ensuring your products stand out and encouraging sales. Although I like my images to look as natural and unedited as possible, I will always edit just to enhance and make my products look as good as they possibly can. Since I mainly use my Samsung Galaxy S5 to take nearly all of my photos, I will use this post to show you the apps that I use and what I do to my images.
First of all it is important that all your images are taken with natural light. My very professional set up involves taking photos on my windowsill. However although you want natural light, you don't necessarily want a bright and sunny day as this can create reflections and harsh shadows. To counteract this I will sometimes stick tracing paper to the window as a way of softening the light.
Now that the basics are covered lets move on to editing the image. There are two main apps I use for actually "editing" the image: Afterlight and of course Instagram.
Afterlight
This is my go to editing app as I find it a lot more flexible than Instagram. I take all my photos using the 16 mega-pixel phone camera, rather than through the app, and then use the app to crop, rotate and enhance the image.
This is the raw image taken and cropped. First of all I always sharpen the image to enhance any lines; I find this particularly useful for products in glass bottles or with tiny watch parts. The depending on the image I will either lighten it or apply a filter - both have pretty much the same effect but I find that enhancing the light level is more subtle. In some cases I will also slightly increase the contrast.
This image has been sharpened, lightened and had the contrast increased slightly to enhance the shading of the Moon. Lets see another example:
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| Raw Image |
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| Edited Image |
If I use a filer the only one I use is "Glacier" which lightens the image and adds a frosty effect to the image. I never apply a filter 100%, in fact the strength is usually below 50%.
Instagram
If I'm feeling empty I will use Instagram so that I can instantly upload to my feed (but you can also do this through Afterlight). I rarely apply Instagram filters to my images now but used them a lot before I discovered Afterlight. The main filters I use are: Crema, Slumber and Valencia. If I am editing an image for an advert, rather than a listing photo, I tend to use the more dramatic filters such as: X-Pro 2, Amaro and Walden. I will also use Instagram to sharpen my images.
A Beautiful Mess
When it comes to adding text and illustrations to my photos I use A Beautiful Mess. I think that you have to pay a little for this app but it is totally worth it. All of the pictures you can add are in a cute "hand drawn" style which is perfect for me. There are a variety of fonts available on the app, some of which you have to buy (again worth it), but I really like the cute "handwriting" style ones.
Pixlr
I will use Pixlr when I want to create a collage or pictures. The app has a variety of different layouts and you can create different shape and borders around images.
I hope you have enjoyed this blog and found the information useful.
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