Digital Shutters

I have to appoligize to my readers for not posting yesterday. I recently pick up a new contract with a new real estate company and have been rather busy. But I have stoped what I’m doing to give you a few tips on how to touch up those summer photos. With the end of school there are a lot of snapshots taken that need touched up. And probably scrap books to be made. But you find that a lot of the pictures you have you don’t want to use because the colors just aren’t right. If you spent time at the beach and there are some of those photos with sun burnt faces you can take some of the redness from the photo with a little color enhancement. The quickest fix is using your hue / saturation filter. Open your program and the photos you want to fix.

• Choose your image adjustments menu and choose Hue /Saturation.
• In the drop down box you’ll want to choose the red color.
• Next move the slider of the hue to the usually to the right and reduce the reds until you have a desirable color.
• Choose the slider of the saturation and move it to the usually to the left and reduce the skin tones until they look more natural.
• Then you can apply a cooling filter to get an even more natural look. A I did in the photos below.

You can also use this technique to increase the blues of the sky, make the grass greener. Play around with your pictures and you will be surprised at how easy these simple adjustments are.

One of the best things that you can do with your digital camera is to keep a photographic record of your valuables. Lately with all this bad weather and flooding, it made me start thinking about updating my insurance records. For years I have always kept a digital record of the things I have in my house, I have saved them on disk and kept a printed record. The Insurance company would have a hard time disputing that you owned an item if you had picture proof of it in your home.

• Of course start with taking photos of everything you have. Start by taking pictures of the rooms in your house from each corner. This will be sure to get all the important items that you might miss otherwise.
• Next do individual photos of big ticket items.
• For things like videos, CD’s etc lay out a set to get as many in the photo as possible.
• Do not forget Jewelry; use a ruler to help show size.
• Take photos of your clothing, dishes, knick knacks, everything.
This may take awhile to do but it is the best record and proof you‘ll have for your insurance company. Once you have the photos taken save them to CD’s and make a print of all the pictures you’ve taken. After you’ve printed your photos it’s a good idea to write the serial numbers of the items like TV’s, Stereo’s, Computer’s etc on the back of the photo’s along with a list of the items and serial numbers. Make several copies and store them in a safe place away from your home
• Away from your home in a safe deposit box.
• A copy at your job
• Use an online photo storage place that is password protected.
As you get new items take pictures of those items to keep up to date. Being safe and keeping good records will help you recover quickly if there ever is a disaster.

Photo of the day

insurance records, photo tips, record keeping