I have been playing with Photoscape once again - a delightful free program that can be downloaded by anyone. It offers so many options that even experienced photo manipulators can have fun with it - but it is so easy to use that even complete novices can manage fantastic results. I have a really boring photo that I didn't mind playing with, I found an old anchor laying in the grass many kilometers from the sea and no indication of where it might have come from. The grass has been neatly mown all around it so even if no one actually asks about it they can see it!
First find your photo - finding the picture is just like using Windows Explorer. I keep all my photos in folders in one of my drives so I first select the drive, then the main folder followed by the sub folders until the pictures appear in the area below.
Click on the picture for it to appear in the main screen.
Even though this photo is not dark, I added a little brightness to it.
Most of the selections for adjustment are under the "Home" tab (bottom left of this screen grab). I clicked on Bright,Color (all the clicks have been highlighted with red), slid the cursor up to Brighten and clicked on the little arrow to make the pop-out box appear then selected the amount of brightness that suits the image. For me this was "Low"
With such a boring picture I felt that sepia would suit it. Here is what I did next.
As you can see, the first two steps were the same as for "Brighten".
Even with sepia added the picture still did not look very special so one more effect was added.
This time I have numbered the steps I took so that you can follow my path. I tried each of the seven variations before settling on number 4.
This is how the picture looks now.
Now it has a bit of character!
The funny thing is I spend a lot of my time with old photos trying to make them look as though they have just been taken and here I am deliberately making a "today" photo look as though it has been to the dump and back!
Say I want to save this image. . .
I would like to email it so I will reduce the size so that it will not take too long to send
Trial and error has shown me that by reducing the longest side to 700 pixels will give a photo a good size as an email attachment.
Click on "Save" down on the bottom right of the Photoscape page and then click on "Save as".
You should ALWAYS keep your original photos. Any changes you make to that photo should be saved to a different location. Photoscape has even thought of that - if you chose to just hit "Save" the original photo will be saved as well!
You will be asked in the next pop up window about the quality you want to save the picture.
Pay more attention to the KB size than anything else. Slide the slider to make your changes.
If the picture was straight from the camera the slider will be almost to the very left of the slide, my photo was not large to start with (I would confuse you by telling you why!) so the slider is almost midway and the quality over 80%.
Do have a play with Photoscape - there are lots of options to experiment with. If you want to know how to do something something specific, just drop me a line!
AJ joanren@gmail.com
