Topic: RedTops Studio is Open for Business on Etsy!

[Ken (OP)]

My RedTops Studio is now open for business!   



There are only three items listed at this point, but I have several more in the works and they will be posted soon.

You can see my Etsy pages here... RedTops Studio

[Ken (OP)]

A very big Thank You goes out to Les for this great banner he made for my Etsy pages.

[Skhilled]

Need better photos...too bright. The one above looks better.

[Ken (OP)]

I need to make a better light box... maybe use cloth for the background instead of paper.

[Skhilled]

Cloth is fine but you may wish you use something darker? Are you using white cloth? Whatever it is may be making the flash bounce too much which is blowing out the highlights making it too bright.

[Ken (OP)]

This morning I'm 're-turning' the blue/charcoal barrel shaped stopper to make it look like the red one and plan to photograph the result, but not do so in the light box. Might lay it on the dinning room table and include a bottle as an accent. I'll set the camera on my cheap little tripod and try the zoom thing.

[Skhilled]

Try it different ways until you get what you want. also, if you get it close to what you want, you can use Paint.net or Irfanview to lighten or darken the image further as needed. Both at free programs and good to have.

[Ken (OP)]

Try it different ways until you get what you want. also, if you get it close to what you want, you can use Paint.net or Irfanview to lighten or darken the image further as needed. Both at free programs and good to have.

I've used Irfanview for years now and like it a lot. The Paint is one that I've used very little, but maybe will try again.

[Skhilled]

Paint.net is similar to Photoshop but not as many features. also, if the camera save the images to jpg/jpeg do not resave them as jpg's again! Each time you save a jpg it loses quality. Best to resave or convert them to .png. They will have a small filesize and you can resave them as often as you'd like without any quality loss.

[Skhilled]

Forgot to mention, I say this cause the images appear to be grainy and not sharp which are a sign the they've probably been resaved.

[Ken (OP)]

Back in the day when I was doing a lot of photo's I knew that, but had forgotten... 
Thanks for the reminder. 

[Ken (OP)]

Forgot to mention, I say this cause the images appear to be grainy and not sharp which are a sign the they've probably been resaved.

When the images are downloaded from the camera they are batch resized, batch renamed and saved without much attention being paid to the file extension... gotta change that last part.

[Skhilled]

Ah! I used to do the same thing. But my camera has the option to save as raw images (no quality loss whatsoever but very large filesize) or jpeg. I usually save them as raw images and then batch convert resize, etc. My final files are saved as jpg or png. If the camera's software does not support png then use Irfanview for batch processing.

[Ken (OP)]

That's what I do... the file size from the camera is several MB, so after copying them to a folder I use Irfanview to process them down to a size that works better for the internet.

[Skhilled]

Several MB...that's all? RAW fies start at 10MB but can be twice that and more. LOL A lot harder to get down to size without resizing them.