Shopping Cart
JONDO WINTER WORKSHOP #1: Basic Photo Editing & 20% off your next canvas print!
It certainly feels like Christmas here at JONDO as our diligent elves in production are stepping into high gear as the day draws nearer. And if we feel the pressure here, we are sure many of you are too as you hurry and try to find the perfect gift for your loved ones. Well, what about those photos you have sentenced away for a long while now on your computer? No we don’t want any of that, oh those photos aren’t nice enough to be made into canvas and hung anywhere. Ah humbug we say to that! And since we're already in the holiday spirit, there is a 20% off promo code on your next canvas print at the end of the tutorial!
JONDO's Winter Workshop is jolly to present you with a basic tutorial on how to edit your pretty good photos into canvas ready works of art and sentimental motifs. There are many free online photo editing sources available all of which have more than enough to do the basics and if you wish, much much more. We are going to use Aviary's Advanced Image Editor for our tutorial.
CROPPING
One of the most simple and basic yet very powerful tool is cropping. The first thing is recognizing the potential in a photo. This is hard to see when there is so much extra stuff going on in it. This is where cropping plays a huge role. Cropping a photo transforms where the viewer’s eyes go, giving more focus to a certain subject or creates the illusion of a new and interesting angle of an otherwise normal image.
Take this nice, but not too interesting photo of a flower. I'm sure you have seen many like it. Maybe it’s from your front yard or a random shot you took while strolling around during your summer vacation.
Select the crop tool on the left and select the area of your photo in which you want to keep, the rest will be discarded. Experiment with different areas of your image. Filling the whole selection with your image to make it up close or at a different angle makes the end result much more interesting. Avoid framing your subject in the center of your image, be creative! Here we only select the very center of the flower.
After you have selected your area, click on Image and then Crop Selection
Export your new image and save onto your computer by clicking File and then Export Image. Now THIS I can imagine hanging on my wall at home instead of the original yawn-worthy image. You could do these with a few other different colored flowers and hang them side by side as a set. It would look great as decor anywhere.
(We boosted the color and contrast a bit for the final photo to make it much more vibrant. We will show you how to do this next.)
MORE PHOTO EDITING
We will use this photo next to demonstrate how to take a quick snapshot you took on your phone and adjust the lightness, darkness, hue and saturation, and more to turn it into a portrait ready to print and wrap!
ROTATE
Since this photo is taken at a tilted angle, we will rotate it to make it level.
Select the Transformation tool on the left, this will show the boundary box around your image. Hover your cursor above a corner of your photo and the rotate icon should pop up. Drag and rotate your image until the subject is at the desired level.
Crop your now leveled subject using the steps from before.
 LEVELS
The levels tool is best used when your photo is either overexposed (too bright) or underexposed (too dark). It can be found under Image.
After selecting this tool a window will pop up with a histogram image with sliding hash marks underneath it. In basic terms, sliding the hash mark on the left will adjust the blacks of the photo, changing the darkness while sliding the hash mark on the right will adjust the whites of the image changing the lightness. Here we brought the left hash mark towards the center to create more contrast in the photo as well as brought in the right hash mark to make sure it is not too dark.
HUE & SATURATION
The hue and saturation tool allows you to change well, the hue and saturation of your photo, along with the brightness. It is found under Image. If you move the hash mark under hue, your photo will change into a rainbow of different colors. Great for if you're going for a colored filter look. Other than that it can be used to offset too much yellow or redness in photo. The saturation settings makes colors more vivid but risks making the colors overblown. Less is always more with this tool I feel. Here we left everything as is besides upped the Saturation by a tiny amount to bring out more color in her clothes and face.
BRIGHTNESS & CONTRAST
If you already adjusted your photo using the levels tool, changing the brightness and contrast is usually not necessary. You can also find this tool under Image. It is a much more simplified way of adjusting the darks and lights in your photo but leaves more risk of losing details such as shadows and may leave your image looking overexposed. If you don't really care about the details in your image and are simply going for dramatic, I like to use brightness and contrast instead. Since we already changed the levels, we won't be using this tool.
SHARPENING
The sharpening tool is found under Filters. You can choose to use the sharpen filter to make the details of the photo more prominent. However with a lot of photos, especially lower resolution photos, this can be overdone and make the lines seem unnatural and the image more pixelated, so use your own judgment.
And here is the result!
Printing a portrait onto canvas is a great gift for mom or grandma and is a modern twist on those 10 other old dusty framed photos that you've given them in the past. I'm sure they would agree! And you don't have to spend big bucks to get any of your photos printed on museum-quality canvas. And to make it even better, when you enter the promo code WINTERWORKSHOP at checkout on JONDO.com you will receive 20% off your entire order! Now that's something to give a Ho Ho Ho about!
