Experience with editing pictures for my blog
I’m running my blog for more than a decade now. As it is common with bonsai blogs, most of the content is visual. Mainly photography so far, but it could change in the future though. But I didn’t want to write about the future of bonsai blogging today.
Let me talk
just a little about picture editing. When I was starting I was not editing
pictures at all, I saw no reason to do that. Later on, I was looking for a good,
easy and cheap way of doing that and I have discovered Google Picasa. It is
free has many good tools and I found out it is doing the job.
Few months
ago I was discussing this topic with one of my bonsai buddies and he suggested I
should try to use something better. He told me about Zoner Photo Studio and I
decided to give it a try. I’m using it for quite some time and I can tell you I’m
satisfied. It is a much stronger tool than my previous Picasa. It has a lot of
options for picture editing and processing. I’m not familiar with all the tools
by far yet. Let me show you on few screenshots how I’m going through the
process from original photography to picture I post on my blog or social media.
Pictures as
taken in my garden, the background is not perfect and the distance from the object is
not ideal but I’m limited by available space so I have to work with what I
have. Also natural light is the issue due to the orientation of my space. Usually
my pictures are a bit brighter or darker then I would like to have.
I’m starting editor on the left. With a crop tool, I make the desired size of the picture with the tree on the place I would like to have. Sometimes when I fail to put my tripod with a camera into exact position I have to tilt the picture few degrees to either side.
My next step is turning on colour editing tools. I usually play with brightness, and try to do correction of colours, contrast. Most of the time it is enough.
At that moment I'm finished. Obviously, you have a much wider range of options and time to time I use some of its arsenals. At this point, I insert my watermark tag on the picture and then I export it in whatever quality I would like to have it. Then it is ready to go to the blog. It can take up to 15 minutes of editing for 4-8 pictures I usually post per tree. The good thing is that after editing one picture, after clicking on edit colour option, all sliders stay at last positions and pictures is edited automatically with the same properties. It is a fast and convenient way of editing.
If you are interested you can try out Zoner Photo Studio X free for a month on the linked page. I make photos in JPG and even though I know the RAW format is the better way to go, this is a workflow that works for me. Anyway, I'm taking more pictures in the RAW format now and I definitely will try Develop module of the Zoner with much stronger editing tools. I will report on progress. If you decide to give it a try let me know how it works for you.
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