I wanted to update the look of my website and I think those feminine desktop stock photos are so pretty. Overused maybe, but still pretty, clean and modern. I looked for hours for a nice stock photo that would tie in with my blog’s theme and color scheme. I could picture what I wanted, but couldn’t find anything close.
By the way, my favorite place to get stock photos, gorgeous fonts and pretty watercolor graphics for my cards – is Creative Market. I recommend signing up to receive access to the 6 free items a week. I always find fonts that I love that way – and you can’t beat FREE.
Anyway, I finally thought – hey, how hard can it be to throw a couple items together to make my own stock photo? Within 10 minutes, I had pulled out a white foam posterboard for the background and several items I thought might look nice together – with my colors of teal and pinkish. I arranged them on the board – and despite my perfectionism, I actually kept the first setup I did – and I just snapped one photo. Placing the board on a chair allowed me to get a shot from above. I don’t use flash and the lighting is not great today – but I always edit anyway, so I didn’t even worry about camera settings.
Here’s my photo SOOC – straight out of the camera. I’ll show you briefly how I edit photos in my favorite free photo editing program: PhotoScape. Someday I want to do some video tutorials on using PhotoScape. It’s my go-to editing program because it’s so easy. Who needs expensive and complicated PhotoShop? I even use PhotoScape to create my Title Graphics and Pinterest Pins, like the title collage at the top of this post.
I don’t always rely on Auto Level – it always comes out blueish or green hued to me. Basically, the few quick edits I do to every photo are: Brighten, Contrast, White Balance and Crop. I also Resize to create smaller web-friendly copies of my photos.
I couldn’t believe how easy that was! And what a difference it makes in the look of my website.
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