You don’t have to be a photo manipulation wizard to make your photos look good.  By tweaking only the brightness and contrast of an image you can make them look great!  And the best part is…you can do this using a free image editing software called GIMP.  I usually use Photoshop but GIMP is free and very similar to use.

First you’ll have to download and install the program.

Once installed…open it up.

Here’s the original ugly photo…straight from the camera.

From the top menu chose File > Open.  Find the location of your image and open it.

From the top menu choose Colors > Brightness-Contrast.

Move the Brightness and Contrast slider up or down depending on the adjustments needed. If you’re using an image taken in a light box, you want the white in the background to turn white as you can see has happened in my image.  It takes a bit of playing with to get how it works…

I’ve gotten the color in my photo to look pretty good.  The gray background is now mostly white and the colors of the soap have brightened a bit.  Once you’re satisfied with the color…you’ll need to crop the image.  To do this click on the crop tool to select it.

Click and drag a box around what you want cropped, release the mouse, click on the inside of the box and your image will crop.

You can play around with the crop tool and do different crops.  Save-as the different versions so you can compare and choose the one you like most.

And there you go!  A beautiful photo for your website or Etsy.  This just brushes the surface of image editing.  You can play with all sorts of things more in depth like color, contrast, hue…everything!

But this is a good start to producing more attractive photos of your products.

Happy Soaping!

-Amanda Gail

For an updated post on photography and editing, click the image below.