Before we get started on the tutorial, I just wanted to mention that I added a Shop tab to the top of my header, so you can see everything I have in my OpenSky shop without leaving this site.  In case anyone is interested, I added my Bodum french press to the shop as well. It makes really delicious coffee! If you are interested in purchasing anything, don’t forget to take advantage of the 25% off by using the code EXCITE25. It expires August 16th!

Now on to the tutorial. First I want to say that I know very little about photography. I use a point-and-shoot camera on automatic setting to take the majority of my photos. For the most part, I just do what I think looks good from various trial and error over the years. As long as I take the picture in natural light, and use the macro setting with a pretty steady hand, my pictures tend to turn out well. When I discovered Picnik.com, I began taking my pictures to the next level and making them look even better.

For those who don’t know, Picnik is a free online photo editing site which I use to do all of the editing for my blog photos. To take full advantage of the site, you have to sign up for a free account, but there is also a premium one which has a small annual fee and offers more features. For the past year, I have been using the free one and I haven’t really felt the need to pay for premium, but that is completely up to you. Before continuing with my tutorial, you may want to click over to Picnik and have a look around first. If not, please keep reading!

The first step is to select a photo from your computer and upload it into Picnik.

Here is what the screen will look like once you upload a photo:

Your can see there are many options available in the menu at the top. The first thing I always do is the Auto-Fix, which is basically Picnik’s quick fix to make your photo look better.

If you are happy with that, you can stop there, but I always go a few more steps. Next, I re-size the photo so it fits my blog better. Usually your camera settings will determine the size of your photos, so you may or may not need to re-size them. Picnik will automatically adjust the ratios for you, unless you select otherwise.

Here is the same photo, only made smaller:

If I am going to crop the photo, I will usually do so after re-sizing it. Cropping is great for focusing on certain parts of the photo that you want to highlight or cutting out aspects of it that you don’t like.

Each photo is different, so I usually play around a few times before I decide on the look I am going for.  Since I take most of my photos outside, they tend to come out overexposed at times, so I usually adjust the exposure and contrast, under the Exposure tab.

The Exposure section also has an Auto-Fix button if you want to use it, but I like to adjust it myself with the slider buttons until I am happy with the result. In the picture above, I changed the exposure to -5 and the contrast to 2 since I liked the way it looked. You can tell I know nothing about real photo editing, and basically let Picnic and my eyes do the work for me. I love being able to change the look of my photos without getting too technical!

Next, I adjust the temperature and saturation under the Colors tab. I use the sliders in the same way I did the exposure, until I am satisfied with the result.

I usually go ahead and adjust the sharpness by a tiny bit too.

The good thing about Picnik is that it is very user-friendly and includes instructions and tips as you go along. Even if you are total photo-editing idiot such as myself, you can still create some really beautiful photos!

So are you ready for the before and after? Here you go:

Which one looks more appetizing to you? The changes are very subtle, but I think the editing makes a big difference in the quality of the photo. It only takes a few minutes too! Here are some other examples of photos I have edited on Picnik.

Not just food photos either!

And once you are done with all of your edits, you can save the photo to your computer and it is yours forever. How cool is that? Be sure to check out Picnik and start experimenting with photo editing. After all, you can always revert back to the original so no harm is done.

Was this tutorial helpful? Everything I just showed was under the Edit section of Picnik. We haven’t even started to explore the super fun Create section!  I am going to do a series showing all kinds of other amazing stuff you can do with Picnik, this was only the first! Is there anything you would like to learn about? Perhaps making your own blog header or banner from a photo? Let me know!

{ 12 comments }