Let’s face it: unless you’ve trained your entire life to become a professional photographer, you are not one. Therefore don’t expect you pictures to be such masterpieces like the Afghan Girl. However, in most cases you shouldn’t just simply upload your photos to a photo book editor and leave them without modifications.
You can easily make your pictures even greater than the moments and objects you captured in them, all without taking a photography or photo editing course. After reading this article about some of the straightforward photo enhancement methods that you have at your disposal, you will realize that slightly modifying your photos doesn’t hurt after all.
It’s totally understandable if you don’t dare touching your pictures on a more advanced level after they have been put into the photo book. But like we said before, with the exception of a few companies like BrideBox and Mpix, no modifications are made on your photos, thus they will appear the way they can be seen on your computer screen: dark pictures will be dark, blurry ones will be blurry and so on. In conclusion, some modifications are a must.
Your picture editing options heavily depend on the photo book editor you have chosen. Most of the time you can only do basic things like rotating, cropping, mirroring etc., which is especially true if you choose a photo book theme that has fixed photo placeholders. Some advanced editors, like Shutterfly, offer you more options like adding shades, certain filters to your photos, applying frames and making slight adjustments to the saturation, hue, brightness and such. The best options we have encountered are found in RitzPix and Collage.com; while the former uses the complementary services of Adobe Creative Cloud and PicMonkey, and the latter has everything incorporated therein, both solutions are capable of creating an almost perfect Instagram feeling without actually using the app.
If your chosen photo book builder doesn’t perform well regarding those pesky adjustments, then you have to find other software or apps for making true masterpieces out of your pictures. And thankfully, there are a lot of solutions for that:
The most logical solution is Instagram, not only because it is free and available for all mobile platforms, but many photo book editors allow uploading Instagram photos. However, if you are in for other options, you can try apps like Pixlr, Aviary, Camera+, PicsArt and many more.
We already mentioned that RitzPix uses Adobe Creative Cloud and PicMonkey which present many adjustment options similar to those of Instagram. Google buffs can always trust Google Photos (the successor of Picasa), while the Pixlr app users can try out the company’s Editor or Express versions.
Probably the best option for free desktop editing is Gimp which, despite having a rather familiar interface to Photoshop, is still capable of performing any task you want. Quite surprisingly the long-running photo viewer software IrfanView is also a great choice, mostly for batch editing and file conversion, while Paint.NET is a very basic yet handy editor that easily surpasses its namesake, Microsoft Paint.
We’re 100% sure that the first software coming to your mind hearing photo editing is Adobe Photoshop, the mother of all image editors. Granted, it is great software, but let us tell you two words: Photoshop Elements. You might ask what that program is; it is basically a less advanced yet equally outstanding alternative to Photoshop intended for non-professionals like you with friendlier, more understandable interface.
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