The idea of Facebook is to connect with people and to stay in touch with old friends and family. It’s a nice idea, but ultimately it’s probably not the way most of us predominantly use it. Rather what most of us use Facebook for is to spy on people we know/used to know and to compare our lives, and to create a kind of shop window into our own lives that makes us look active, interesting and attractive. Ultimately it’s an exercise in narcissism really, isn’t it?
And with that in mind it makes sense that many of us would want to find ways to edit our pictures to make ourselves look more attractive, or to make the scenes we’re in seem more exciting and colorful.
If you find yourself in just such a position then don’t feel bad about it, read on and we will look at how you can make your pictures look like glossy magazine covers…
Thankfully there is one tool available for those who want their pictures to look more professional that doesn’t require any special knowledge and is completely free. Enter: Instagram which is a piece of photo editing software that will enable you to quickly add a photo filer and change the brightness/contrast to create a more glossy looking image or a more retro-stylized one (whichever you prefer).
At the same time you can also use Instagram to add a nice haze around the edge and a frame and though the options are really rather limited it’s surprising how much more you can add to your pictures very quickly this way.
Photo Editing Software
However what Instagram won’t do for you is to turn you into Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. For that you’ll need to do some genuine photo retouching using something like PhotoShop. Note however that if you can’t afford PhotoShop or get hold of a cheap/free version somehow, then you can use other software such as Gimp to achieve a similar effect.
There are many features that you can use in these programs to edit your images and improve your looks or improve the scenery. Changing the color variations for instance can allow you to pick out reds or greens, while the color replacement tool can also be useful for changing the hue of an image to make it more vibrant/romantic/artistic. Again you have options to change the contrast and brightness as well as to alter the shadows and highlights.
If you want to use this to change your physical appearance however, then you will probably be looking to remove blemishes. One way to accomplish this is by simply applying a blur filter, or alternatively you can also try using the smudge tool and the cloning tool to even out the skin tone. Decreasing mid-tone contrast meanwhile can also give you that porcelain look.
One other way to improve your looks is to increase the size of desirable features and to reduce the others – i.e. bigger eyes, lips and breasts and small nose, waist and feet. To accomplish this go into liquify and then use the tool to increase and decrease the size of selections to gradually change your looks.
Note however that all these things are best used in moderation. Making some slight tweaks will make you glow, whereas going overboard will make you look inhuman. The former is preferable as you can imagine.
About the Author
Mark Simpson is a professional blogger who is keen on writing about photography. The website provides details about wedding photographers and sheds some light on the subject of wedding photography in Melbourne.
How to Edit Your Facebook Photos to Look Beautiful is a post from: Images For Designers and Photography Blog
