editing lightbox photos

I promised a tutorial on editing the lightbox photos, so here we go! For this tutorial, I will be using gimp, a free editing software available online. The tools are essentially the same as those found in photoshop or paint shop, but I'm not sure how transferable this tutorial is to other programs. Don't forget you can click on the edges of photos on my blog to make them bigger.

I'm starting with this picture of bottle cap earrings made from Landshark. The only thing I've done to this photo so far is scale it down 50%. Step One is to go to "Colors" on the top toolbar and select "Levels."

You're going to click on the white dropper tool, circled in red, and then click on an area of your background in the photo. See how much that changes it? I selected one of the lighter areas, and then accepted the changes.

My picture is now much brighter! However, I wasn't satisfied with the shadowing towards the outside, so I cut it out. I used the freehand selection tool to delete those areas.

Almost there! You can see that this left a definite line in my photo from deleting it. I went ahead and ran through my levels again to brighten and clean it up. Finally, I cropped the picture down to 1620x1620, which is the size I'm trying to make all my images. (Arbitrary, but consistent.)

Isn't that so much better? And pretty easy! I've been messing around in editing software for a long time, so this wasn't bad for me - I hope it was easy to follow if you are new to editing!

How is your photo editing going? What program are you using? Let me know in the comments!

the night is dark and full of terrors

But I brightened it up!

I love trying to be creative in my photographs. I love incorporating natural elements, and using the nice bright sunshine. I have a couple problems, though. The neighborhood gives me some strange looks when I wander around with handfuls of jewelry and a digital camera, for one. Secondly, I simply find lightbox photos to be far more professional and attractive! I've been searching for the perfect box for quite some time. I've tried cardboard boxes, tissue paper, various light sources, pledging my first born, and extensive photo editing and never got a result with which I was satisfied. Until today, that is!

The solution was simpler than I ever would have thought, given to me courtesy of The Pretty Pickle. I only had to buy a couple lights - which I wanted for fall's craft shows anyway - and a clear plastic storage box. Easy peasy! Read the full tutorial here.

When I was taking the pics, I was floored because they were so much nicer than any other lightbox method I had tried! They looked great on my camera! When I transferred them to my computer, I was dismayed to find they were a little darker than I thought. So, I brought them into gimp, my trusty free photoshop substitute.

I plan to post a complete tutorial on lightening photos from lightboxes, but I stayed up far later than planned piddling around with this project. Any success or failure stories in photographing your products? Let me know if this one works for you!