Holiday snapshots: How to edit and share them
The best thing about coming home from a wonderful holiday is that you can show off your tan and your photos to your friends and relatives. With these basic tips, your snapshots are guaranteed to make the right impression.
1. Less is more
Just because you took thousands of photos during your beach holidays, doesn’t mean you should force your friends and family to look at all of them! Make sure every photo you show them is interesting. If you took fifty very similar pictures of the swimming pool at the hotel, choose the best one and archive the others. Don’t waste the valuable time and attention span of your audience!
2. Choose the right platform to showcase your photos
Most people don’t appreciate it when you clog up their email box with big attachments. It’s better to share your photos through a website such as Photoshop Express, Picasa.com, Photobucket.com, Flickr.com or Facebook.com and send your friends the url of the album. The advantage of using Photoshop Express is that you can use some of the famous Photoshop software to edit your photos online for free. If you prefer to use one of the other sites, you can use the high quality photo editing services of Picnik.com after uploading your images onto your preferred website.
3. Always work on a copy
The most important thing when it comes to editing is that you should always keep an unedited version of your original photo. You can use a web-based editing service or offline software to edit a copy of your photo.
4. Improve the compositions
Most holiday snapshots can be improved by cropping them according to the rule of thirds. Imagine a noughts and crosses grid within your new frame and position the subject of the photo along one of the lines or on one the four intersection points. Your photos will become much more interesting this way.
5. Enhance dull colours
Experimenting with the brightness, contrast, colour intensity, sharpness and focus of your photo can improve your snapshots immensely, even when the original looked fine to you. If only some areas of your photos are a bit too dark or too bright, look for the Dodge and Burn brushes to adjust those specific areas.
This is very good advice, as the mentioned practices are essentially the basics in a general professional workflow as well.
One thing I’d like to add is: ‘pick the right tools!’
)
Software like for instance Apple iPhoto and Google Picasa greatly facilitate a workflow like this. These programs allow you to catalog, tag, rate, crop, straighten and post process your images with relative ease. Recent versions also offer functionality like face detection & recognition as well as methods to use geolocation and time stamps to reconstruct your journey. Last but not least. They often offer a slew of output and sharing options to generate and upload sets directly to for instance flickr or Facebook, order printed albums or even output your selection as a presentation style movie (which you can upload to youtube or a similar service). An example of what iPhoto is capable of, fully automated:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w94_GByIwbw
(I must admit, although I used only one out of every twenty or so shots, that it’s still too long… So I’m not offended if it bores you