ok ninie, this one is for you. i’m gonna show what i usually do to photos before i post them on my blog. that said, i have to stress that you have to have a decent-quality photo to start with. you can’t turn shit into gold. but you CAN turn shit into a more beautiful piece of shit.

i used to manually edit all my pics with photoshop, but being a slacker that i am, the processes became too tedious. so now i use this nifty little software called Photocleaner. what can it do for you? well, it resizes your pics, adjust levels and colour, sharpness, and it reduces noise and reveals shadows. it can also add frames and captions. your kepala pening with all these jargons? don’t worry. i’ll demonstrate it visually.

i’ll start with a pic, unedited except for resizing. this is my friend Darul Faisal. he’s a bloody joker actually. he’s only posing with a poyo expression because i told him to.

then i open the pic in Photocleaner, set the Resize options (in my blog i use 300 for both width and height, sometimes 400). i set the Level Adjustment slider to the middle setting, Colour Saturation also to the middle setting (sometimes i push it all the way). lastly, i slide the Sharpen slider also to the middle. this is what i get:

do you see how the picture ‘pops out’? the details on the sofa-arm, window, his jeans and the table become clearer?

a little explanation for the settings i used. Levels will balance out the light and dark areas of the picture. if the picture is too bright, it will darken it a bit. if it’s too dark, it’ll brighten it a bit. it’s better than brightness and contrast options that you see in most photo editors because it takes into count the different areas with different brightness and contrast and balances them out.

Saturation increases the amount of colour in your pic.

Sharpen will sharpen (duh!) your picture and bring out small details that you didn’t notice. if you use a shitty picture, this setting will reveal the shittiness and make your pictures look shittier. and notice that there are no major editing done on the pics. but the minor adjustments made it look nicer.

there are other setting to use, such as Reveal Shadows, Noise Reduction and Vignette. but i ain’t showing you… go check them out yourself.

wanna jazz it up a bit? use Frames and Captions. here is my final result:

here’s another ‘before and after picture’ of another friend of mine, nazmir. if you follow the local underground scene closely, you’d notice him as the guitarist of Nervewreck.

i’m no professional photographer or a graphics designer, but i like what the software does to my pictures. for more unique and customized effects, nothing beats photoshop.