BBHQ March task: photo editing

So the beauty bloggers headquarters task for March is to share photo and video editing tips and programmes. Since I don’t have a YouTube channel for my blog this post will focus on photo editing.

I don't do any editing of my blog photographs, mostly through a lack of understanding. I try really hard with my photography to make sure that I get an accurate representation of the products so I have never felt the need to do anything other than crop any extra space.

I use Picasa, which is a free programme by google. It's not particularly fancy, but it does have a few editing features such as redeye, contrast and straighten, as well as the ability to add a range of different effects — my favourite is soft focus.

My main reason for using Picasa was that after running out of space to store photographs on blogger I got into a bit of a panic as to how I was going to put photos onto my blog. I didn't like the sound of uploading to another programme, getting a URL and inserting that into my blog, especially when I read that this didn't always work and pictures wouldn't appear.

So after a quick read on Google I found out that as long as images were less than 800 pixels your storage space is unlimited. Now I am not entirely sure that Picasa is resizing my images to this, but it does say ‘best for online sharing’ and so far I haven’t had any problems! 

The great thing about Picasa was that with one drag and drop step I can place photographs into a folder synced to my blogger account, upload the images and add a watermark so that they are ready to be inserted. Because the images were synced I could select photographs for a blog post wherever I am.

Another programme I have started to use recently is a free app called PictureCollage. From it you can create a college of different sizes, picture numbers and with various effects. For short posts I occasionally need lots of pictures but I don't like all the space they take up. So this is a great option for keeping the size of the post small without losing the detail and images you would want. The app does have options for different frames and effects but I tend to keep everything basic. 

If you are interested in finding out more about editing, there is a link here to all the other bloggers taking part in the March BBHQ task.

Please let me know if there are other apps or free programmes you would recommend and equally what you suggest staying away from!