Bloggers Share Their Photo Editing Tips

Tweet When I set out to gather quotes for this post, I intended to make a round-up of the best Photoshop tips from bloggers in our community. I more-or-less assumed that most established bloggers were using this program to edit their photos before posting. When I reached out to a handful of bloggers to get their input, I was surprised to hear back that most of them don’t even use Photoshop – but rather a whole slew of different editing tools and programs. Alicia from Cheetah is the New Black uses Keynote, and Katy Atlas of SugarLaws uses Google . From Lightroom to Picassa, here are a sampling of the best photo-editing tips from bloggers: Lacey Maffettone (A Lacey Perspective) on Picasa: “I use Picasa (part of Google) to edit my photos. My favorite feature is, by far, the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. It is a one-click way to get the colors in the photo to balance out (that’s whether the picture was too dull or too bright). Sometimes it works beautifully and there are some other times that it does not… but most of the time I feel pretty lucky.” Christina Topacio (ProFresh Style) on Adobe Lightroom: “In Lightroom, there’s an import button for filters that makes editing super easy. My main tip would be to Google “Lightroom presets” to give you quick and easy edited photos without too much effort. (It’s like downloading Photoshop fonts or stamps). I have over 40 presets I filter with with little tweaks.” (IFB has a 4-part series of posts on photo-processing using Adobe Lightroom: here, here, here and here.) Grace Atwood (Stripes & Sequins) on Photoshop: “I have both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements but use Elements for all of my collages and creating graphics. The best tip I ever learned was how to erase a background. It helps to create graphics images. You simply take your image, create a duplicate layer, and then deactivate the background layer. (Click the little eye tool in the layers tab.) Use the magic wand tool to select the background (play with the tolerance feature to ensure you grab the entire background and not parts of your image,) and then hit delete. Voila. Your image is now background-free. Perfect for layering or making a collage. If you want to save it, save it as a PNG file – not a JPEG… if you save as a JPEG, it will automatically add a white background.” IFB’s favorite “quick and dirty” editing tools: Pixlr.com: It’s basically a free version of Photoshop in your browser. Amazing, right? We use it to create collages, edit and add text to our images. (Read our review of Pixlr here!) Picmonkey.com: This in-browser editor has come to replace Picnik.com for us, and it’s interface couldn’t be easier. Make collages, add text or frames, layer filters, crop, resize and perform basic edits, then download and save your image to your computer. iPhoto: If you have a Mac computer, iPhoto is a free-and-easy way to perform basic edits and add filters to your photos. We love that you can easily re-touch (bye-bye blemishes), one-touch enhance (like magic!) or add a myriad of effects from sepia to matte framing. Bloggers we want to know: What photo-processing tools and programs do you use? Share your best tips in the comments! Tweet