November 13, 2013

The Monkey, The Picture Monkey - Formatting your Product Photos

I love the word monkey, that is what I sometimes call my little almost 6 month old daughter. Monkey,  monkey pants, muffin, walnut muff, the list goes on...all those sill baby names.  But I would like to introduce you to pic monkey.  The blog "oh my! handmade" posted a link on their facebook page that of course grabbed my attention: Grab Customer's Attention on your website in Less than 15 Minutes.   Lisa White, from Moxie Pear Design,  is the author of the post and she gives a great video tutorial on vimeo.

Anything to help make better pictures of my product I am interested in.  My camera is a Nikon P7700, which I know nothing about it.  I really would love to take a class but now with a baby it's kinda hard to get extra free time.    I  use photoshop elements or photoshop, bringing the photos first into iphoto.  I know Photoshop and Illustrator because this is what I use when I designed mens sportswear.  For those of you who don't know Photoshop, Pic Monkey is perfect!   It is pretty fun, very similar to photoshop, user friendly but it's free!  There is a Royale membership that is paid for and you will get access to more tweeking, fonts, and effects.

I did a quick collage just to experiment and show an example.  I do like the way the collage looks. I think it definitely is a good way to grab interest on your home page of a website.  I show 3 things that will assist in your kitchen; apron, tea towel and napkins.  It was much quicker to make a collage thru Pic Monkey than Illustrator or Photoshop.

 Here are the three images before collage and effects.







I rounded the corners, added the text, slightly changed the exposure.  I didn't want to add too many effects because I don't want to change the actual look of the fabrics.   However for photos of people, Pic Monkey has lots of air brushing effects to offer.

If you are looking for a quick way to improve and format your photos check out Pic Monkey.

If you do check it out, send me a link. I would love to see what your creative fingers will do with it!


Tracey Toole
http://www.etsy.com/shop/traceytoole