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Experimental Photography And Image Handling For Bloggers: Refresh your skills at creating attention-grabbing pictures.

For today’s Blog Week topic, I decided to tackle some photo editing.

Below is one of the original, unedited pictures I took of my Morgandy Mittens pattern. I love, love, love the mittens, but I never really felt like the pictures showed them off to their best advantage.

As you can see, the color of the mittens looks kind of washed out and flat, and the yellow table background is distracting. The actual yarn (Manos Silk Blend in Bing Cherry) is a luminous, multi-toned purple-red color. Not flat at all!

I went looking for an accurate depiction of it somewhere online and had a lot of trouble finding one. Looks like I’m not the only one whose camera has trouble with reds! This picture, from retailer Eat.Sleep.Knit., is the closest one I found:

First, I tried my quick and dirty method of photo editing: using the tools in iPhoto to tweak exposure, colors, and contrast. After a few minutes, it looked slightly better:

Also kind of fluorescent. Not the best look. So I imported the photo into Photoshop to try some more powerful tools. I’m not great with Photoshop, and I only know how to use about 5% of the things it can do, but sometimes I can get good results by messing around for a while to see what looks good.

Here’s the result of tweaking levels and selective color on the original photo:

Maybe a little better… but still not great (although we’re getting closer to the actual color, so that’s good).

Now I decided to pull out the big guns. One of the best things I discovered a few years ago was Photoshop Actions. These are sequences of layers and filters that people put together to create certain effects and then put up online for free or sale. You click one button and everything gets applied to your original photo, and then you can adjust the layers to get the exact look you want. (I gushed about Actions in this blog post if you want to read more about them.)

Some of the actions I have obviously weren’t going to work for this picture (like the ones to bump up the reds), but I found several that I liked! All the actions below are from the Timecapsule Set by Nelly Nero.

And my favorite of the bunch:

The colors are very close to the actual mittens and the yarn no longer looks flat and dull. Plus, I think the cables show up a lot better than they did in the original.

I’m calling this one a win!