Blogging 101: How I Edit my Manicure Monday Photos

Hello Princesses!

Today I'm going to be showing you how I edit my nail photos! It's really nothing special or complex, but I thought it might be interesting for people who are just beginning their blogs or who (like me) never did art in school and have zero idea how to edit photos.

This is my original, un-edited photo. Don't worry too much about the middle nail looking super gross, it's just that the top coat was too thick and went all bubbly :C

My editor of choice is Picmonkey (mainly because it's all I know). I open my image in Picmonkey and crop my photo using the crop tool.

I also like to use the frames section to create rounded corners for my photos. Make sure that you click the transparent corners box so that you can't see the corners!

Next I open the Exposure tab. Brightness increases the overall brightness of the photo. Highlights brings out the light colours, while Shadows brings out more of the darker colours. Contrast increases the sharpness of the image. I generally take my photos at night in a light tent so I always need to adjust the brightness of the images!

Next up is the editing of the nail polish itself. As you can see in this gross close-up, my top coat has gone thick and bubbly because it's too old. :C The easiest way to fix this is by using the clone tool. The clone tool copies a section of image and pastes it to a place of your choosing. Brush Hardness determines how "hard" you want your copy and paste to look. I leave the Brush Hardness right at zero so I can keep the copy-ing soft.

To start cloning, hold Ctrl, and click the dotted circle where you want to pick up the image, release Ctrl and you will see a full circle appear. To cover this sort of mess, it's easiest to make your second click overlap the first click by quite a lot, so you clone small sections over and over. It takes a while, so be patient!

The trick to cloning is to work in small sections, using downwards and sideways cloning clicks. Zoom in and out to make sure the cloning looks somewhat natural! This method works really well for fixing uneven cuticle lines as well! I forgot to fix the upper right of my nail and you can clearly see where I cloned to the right. LAZY BECCA. 

Make sure you don't edit out any light lines. Shiny nails almost always have some light reflections (it's not the same if they're matte) so you want the cloning to look similar to what it was before, just with any impurities removed! A flat one colour nail will look super obviously edited, just like you wouldn't edit your face to be all one colour with no shadows or highlights.

Watermark your image and you're done! ^.^ There are some additional steps that I take depending on how well I prepped my fingers an how well the photo is taken. Sometimes I need to airbrush my cuticles if they look very dry, and sometimes I use the Mascara tool to add contrast to details like rhinestones or patterns. You can also make your fingers grow a mustache if that's what you're into! (You can also turn yourself into Chewbacca ... ahh ... not that I've tried ...)

 Ok no really.

I hope this was a little helpful! ^.^ Next week I'll show you how I edit my face!