How-To Tweak Your Photos

If you’re a personal style blogger you have probably spent a fair amount of time trying to perfect your photos. And even if you just take photos for fun when your friends get together, you might have tried to tweak your photos to make the image crisper. While I’m certainly no expert in this area… here is the step-by-step process that I go through to take my photos from the camera to the blog. (This is written from the perspective of using Photoshop, but the principles will be the same no matter the editing software you use.

How-to Tweak Your Outfit of the Day Photos:

• Download photos from camera to iPhoto, or whatever photo storing software you use.
• Pre-select the best photos from iPhoto and drag those to my desktop. (I usually pick a few more than I’ll actually post on the blog to give me some options.)
• Open the photos in Photoshop.

• Select the first photo, click the crop button and cut out all the extra background ‘noise’ that will detract from the outfit shot. (I personally like not having my body exactly in the center of the photo and tend to put it off to one side or another, when possible.)

• From there I tweak the coloring. By clicking ‘Image’ then ‘Adjustments’ and ‘Levels.’ Usually I only lighten or darken the photo to bring everything into focus. On occasion I will edit only my outfit by using the magic lasso tool and tweaking the lightness and darkness of that.

• In order to put a border around each picture, next I click the ‘Select’ then ‘All.’

• Click ‘Select’ and ‘Modify’ ‘Border.’ The border size I have is 35, which gives the photos just a little edge.

• Then I click ‘Edit’ and ‘Fill’ to create the border box. I use pure white all the time.

• The last step before saving is to change the image size. Click ‘Image’ and then ‘Image Size.’ My photos are usually 500 pixels in width. I let the height adjust itself in proportion.

• Lastly, I save for web devices, instead of the regular saving technique. Click ‘File’ then ‘Save for web devices.’

• From there I select the save button and make sure to rename the picture according to what is in the image. For instance ‘leopard-print-tshirt’. This naming is one way to have your images picked up in a google image search.

• From there it is just a matter of uploading the photos to your blog and inserting them into your post.

Questions about the process? Leave a note in the comments. Want to know more about photo tweaking? Leave your ideas in the comments and I’ll try to plan another how-to post on the issue. Feel free to check out the Blogging 101 page, which lists a number of other how-to posts on ModlyChic and other blogs.

Related posts:

1. How to take your own photos