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Enhance your photos in minutes with Picmonkey Posted: 19 Jun 2012 05:00 AM PDT I probably don't have to mention this, but humans are visual creatures. We simply respond to imagery much more strongly than we do the written word, especially when it comes to marketing. These days, our social society has further enabled us to capture and share images with our friends and networks with a simple click of a button and a touch of a screen. Scrolling through your facebook newsfeed, you won't be able to get past the first 300px without seeing an upload by one of your friends. For this reason it is ever more important to share photos and images on your brand pages if you want to have any shot of getting noticed. As technology has made it increasingly easy to add images to your pages at a rapid quantity, in order for your brand to stand out, you're going to have to increase the quality of them also. Today I'm going to walk you through an incredibly easy and fun way to retouch your images before you post them to your social networks. With a tiny bit of time and effort, you'll be able to portray an increased professionalism about your brand, without paying for expensive photo shoots or graphic designers. Sound good? Let's begin! While there are many great free photo editing tools on the web these days, see Aviary, Pixlr, they still require a bit of a learning curve to navigate and use their Photoshop-like tool set. If you're simply interested in fixing up your images in a quick, effective, fun way, then I reccommend picmonkey.com Picmonkey is so intuitive and simple to use, it really needs no explanation as to how to get started. Simply pick your image from your computer or drag and drop it on the icon to get begin. IMAGE #1: HEADSHOT The first image I'm going to go over is a headshot of a typical teen with a pretty poor complexion. By walking you through this somewhat extreme example, you'll be able to add those necessary touch-ups to company head-shots, client expose images, news releases, or anything that requires a closeup of a face. Picmonkey has a slew of default tools to use that are clearly organized in their side navigation. The first (Basic) category deals with many of your standard editing tools such as crop, brightness/contrast, rotate, etc. The next category deals with Instagram-like effects to add intrigue to your pictures. However, since the problem with this image is the complexion of the subject, not the composition of the photo, I'm going to skip these for now and head right to the Touch Up category. As we open up the Touch Up category, a list of options appear to the left. We start with the Blemish tool. Spot treat areas of her face with the Blemish tool As with many picmonkey tools, all you have to do is set your brush size and you're ready to start. I simply center each blemish in the radius of my tool and perform a simple mouse click. After about 60 seconds of clicking, I've touched-up most of the major blemishes. Amazing huh? NOTE: After trying this in a couple different browsers, I found that Google Chrome works the best. Specifically with the Blemish tool, when tested in Firefox, had some undesirable results. If possible, I suggest using Google Chrome. Next on the list is the Airbrush. This is the infamous tool that gives supermodels and tabloids a bad rap. The fact is, the Airbrush tool is highly effective at smoothing out skin blemishes, you just need to know how to be subtle. Paint her face with the airbrush tool at approx 50% fade Using the default settings for this tool gave me a little more alteration than I wanted. With that said, I found that if I increased the Fade option to around 50%, it gave me the improvements to her complexion that I wanted without looking like the cover of Cosmo. To use, simply click and "paint" over the image. Next is the Wrinkle Remover. Now being a young teen, our subject doesn't really have any wrinkles, but there were a few areas that the Blemish tool couldn't handle. Simply using the default settings, we go over these areas with the Wrinkle Remover tool, and gasp in amazement at results. Wrinkle Remover will also fix scars and larger blemishes Finally, the last tool we're going to use on this image is the Shine Reduce. There are just a couple of spots around her eyebrow and eye that have a bit of a sheen, but with the help of this handy tool those fade in a second. Use Shine Reduce tool to remove any oily areas Using only a small handful of the tools available, we've completely transformed this headshot from embarrassing to appealing in mere minutes. While it's tempting to try out all of the tools in the set, it's important to identify the key issues in any given photo and stick to fixing them, preventing the dreaded "over editing" that you see all too often. IMAGE #2: FOOD The next image we're going to fix is a picture of a pizza I took using my phone. Food is one of the trickiest things to photograph, and unfortunately a bad food photo can sometimes do more to hurt your appetite than help. While if you run a restaurant, I do suggest getting some professional photographs done, here are a few tricks I've learned along the way to get by in a pinch. For this image, we're going to jump right into the Effects category. The first thing I want to do is increase the brightness and contrast of the image a tad. However, while there is a Brightness/Contrast tool, I'm going to handle this using a more powerful tool called Curves. Adjust the Curves tool in an “S” pattern to increase brightness and contrast The Curves tool, located near the bottom of the Effects category allows you to affect the input tones of a given image. While there is much to this tool that could be explained (most of which I don't even know myself), for the sake of this tutorial, just know that creating an "S" shape by dragging a point near the top and bottom of the line like pictured will allow you to control the brightness and contrast. I prefer doing it this way, as it provides a little more control over the output of the image. Next, one of the most noticeable changes you can make to a food photo is the balance between hard and soft focus. Picmonkey has an awesome tool for this called the Focal Soften tool. By choosing a radius to have a central focus, and blurring out the rest, I can guide the eyes of the viewer to the desired area of the image, increasing its impact. Blur the outer edges using the Focal Soften tool Next, I'm going to hop back up to the Basic category and adjust the Temperature of the image. Increasing the temperature of the image gives it a slightly "warmer" look to it by adding some reddish tones. Since the color red is said to stimulate your appetite (ever notice how many restaurant logos include red?), having a slightly reddish hue as opposed to a colder blue can help. Increase the temperature to give the image a “warmer” feel Lastly, I feel like this image needs some help with its presentation. To aid with this, I'm going to go down to the Frames category and add some Photo Corners to it. Use frames with discretion, as too much of this can start to look tacky, but feel free to play around with these if it fits with your brand. Add a frame to treat your picture like artwork We compare the before and after, and we see a much more appetizing version of my delicious pizza, despite it being taken with a camera phone in poor lighting. IMAGE #3: LANDSCAPE For my last image, I am using another photo I took on my phone, this one from a hotel room I stayed at during a golfing trip. This was the view of the course in the morning, and I couldn't resist snapping a photo. While the vista is obviously a pretty sight, the picture leaves a little to be desired, and doesn't really do justice to the actual view. To add a little "extra" to this image, I played around with a variety of effects to make it look like a postcard. Dark lighting and low quality camera take away from scene’s actual beauty I'm not going to give you step-by-step instructions for this one, because I want you to exercise your creativity. There's very little "technique" involved when playing around with the effects, it's simply about finding the look you're going for without going overboard. After a couple of adjustments, I settled on a "vintage" look. Play around with some Effects to find the look you want I then go to the Text category to add a little saying to my presentation, and follow it up with another frame (I know, I know, I told you not to use too many frames, but what can I say, these are so much fun!). The result is a cool postcard-like image that uses the low quality of the shot to portray a vintage look. So there you have it, an easy way to take a not-so-perfect photograph and make it work for your business with very little time and no money! Just remember, the goal is to make these look professional, so be subtle. If you go too overboard, it's going to look like you, well, found a really easy fun way to alter photographs, and couldn't contain yourself. While that may be the case, the trick is to make it look like you never even touched it at all. Cheers!

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