Photo:Tips

Lighting, Lighting, Lighting, Your photographs before editing need light. natural, indirect sunlight is always best. near a window if possible. You may have to move lamps, open blinds, move your subject outside, move your subject towards a window. Lighting is a key element in your photograph. Not having good light can ruin a great composition. Bring in the LIGHT!

• natural, indirect sunlight is always best. Document during the day near a window if possible.

• If you don't have a good indirect light, try using a light box or two to three diffused lights.

• Try to avoid using the flash if possible - if you have the option on your camera use a flash diffuser

• If you're taking detailed and up close photos make sure to use the macro setting on your camera. This tutorial will walk you through it!

• In you're shooting in low light or you have an older camera - use a tripod! Older cameras tend to not have any sort of stabilization feature, and low lighting is always where camera shake shows up the worst. I have both a tabletop tripod and standard tripod for this reason.

• Clean up the area you're shooting in! Try to keep the surface you're working on and the wall behind it nice and clear (or at least organized) if possible. If not, take process shots in another location. You want your project to be the focal point.

Composition,Composition,Composition, Elements of composition are: patterns, texture, symmetry, asymmetry, depth of field, lines, curves, frames, contrast, color, viewpoint, depth, negative space, filled space, foreground, background, visual tension, shapes. Use one or more of these elements to create a composition that works for your image.

5 Rules For Better Shot Composition and Framing

• Rule of Thirds.

• Symmetry / Centred.

• Foreground against Background.

• Fill in the frame / Textures.

• Leading lines.

Editing Your Photography,

1. Cropping Your Photos: Cropping your photos is a really fast way to improve them. You can crop out distracting items around the focal point of the photos or use it to zoom in on whatever you're photographing. It can even be used to completely change the composition of the photo!

2. Adjusting the Brightness/reducing Shadows: Upping the exposure/brightness is a great first step to correcting. Since most of us make things inside, it can get pretty dim. I like photos that are nice and bright but not neon or to the point of being so bright they go pastel. When increasing the brightness, beware of blow-outs, which is what I call those huge white spots that can appear if there was anything shiny, light-colored, or metallic in your photos. Don't take it that far.

3. Saturation: If your photos looked more washed out than you remember or if upping the brightness made them go pale, saturation will fix that! I always up the saturation in my photos - even for photos taken outside! Saturation deepens the colors in photos and makes them look more vibrant. This is another part of the process you need to be careful with because it's easy to go nuts with it. I always try to remain faithful to the original colors (especially when photographing something I'm selling) and keep it from turning into a Dr. Suess book.

4. Hue / Color & Balance: Sometimes photos can have a strange color cast to them. This often becomes much more obvious after upping the saturation - if you have a problem, you'll see it! Yellow and blue are the most common and are caused by indoor lighting. If a photo is looking yellow, up the amount of blue in the photos and vice versa. iPhoto has a great interface for doing this, but it's easy in nearly every other photo editor, too. This can be tricky to entirely correct in more basic photo editors, but it can be improved quite a bit!

5. Contrast: is not something I use all that often often, but is extremely useful for black and white images as well as adding a bit of drama to color images. A higher contrast essentially means that the dark colors are darker and the light colors are lighter. It's kinda like saturation and exposure had a baby, but a bit more complicated.

6. Adding Text: In some cases, adding text to your photos is a great idea! It's huge on sites like Pinterest and Buzzfeed - it's hard to find a tutorial without flashy text on the photos. If you think you'll want to add text to the photos, keep that in mind while taking the photo and cropping it. It's best to leave a little empty/uncluttered space to add the text. You can also add contrasting text on top of a fairly busy photo - it's just trickier. One thing that you can do if you really want to add text but don't have the clear space you need is add a slightly transparent overlay! PicMonkey has a good selection of geometric and more complicated shapes. Both Pixlr Express and PicMonkey have some great text options - I use them exclusively for adding text. You can also add text using Picasa, but I found the interface to be really frustrating to work with. The upside to Picasa is that you can use fonts installed on your computer, while PicMonkey and Pixlr have a smaller selection to choose from.

A word on choosing a font - keep it easy to read! If you can't tell what it says immediately, pass.