Ask any successful seller on Etsy for tips on how to improve sales in your shop, and 99.9998%* of them will tell you that your items need to have great pictures.
(*statistic might be made up)
In this post, I'll be showing how to correct common photo problems using Phoenix, Aviary's free, online Image Editor. So you won't even need expensive photo editing software!
Help! My photos are too dark!
One of the most common problems users run into is with exposure. For extreme cases of photos being overly dark or bright, you may need to re-shoot your photograph. But often times, you can adjust the brightness in Phoenix.
First, launch Phoenix and select "Load existing file" to upload your photograph into the program.
I would recommend doing your adjustments on a duplicated layer (Layer > Duplicate Layer), so you"ll always have your original photo on a separate layer in case you want to undo the adjustments you made.
To adjust the brightness of your photo, open the Brightness & Contrast dialog from the Image tab. Slide the Brightness slider to the right to make the image brighter if it's too dark, and slide it to the left to make the image darker if your photo is too bright. Additionally, you can raise the Contrast by using the Contrast slider as well. When you are satisfied with the results, click Ok to apply the adjustment.
My photos are too blue!
Often times, taking your photos in natural light may create a blue cast over your image. You can fix this problem by adjusting the channel levels in your photo. Open up the Levels dialog from the Image tab.
In the Levels dialog, you will see a preview of your image with your Levels adjustments, on the fly. Select Blue from the Channel dropdown. You will see three sliders in the dialog. Slide the midpoint slider to the right, which will control the brightness and darkness of the selected channel.
The left slider will control the lightest areas of your channel, while the right slider will control the darkest.
Play with the settings until the blue cast is removed from your image, then click Ok to apply the adjustment.
You may also need to raise the Brightness & Contrast (from the Image tab) to fix the overall exposure of the image.
Alternately, if you find your indoor photos appear to have a yellow cast, you can adjust the Red and Green Channels in the same way.
How do I create clean white backgrounds in my photos?
It is desirable to use clean, simple backgrounds for your products, as not to distract from your items.
To enhance the brightness of your white background, first adjust the Brightness & Contrast (from the Image tab) of the entire image. For my image, I raised the Brightness by 20 and raised the Contrast by 33.
You can also use the Paintbrush Tool with the foreground color set to white to spot clean any undesirable areas, such as creases. Create a new layer (Layer > New Layer) and use the Paintbrush Tool to paint directly over the areas you want to "white out".
How do I create Depth of Field in my photos?
Using the Blur Tool, you can blur distant elements in your photos to create the appearance of depth of field. The Blur Tool can be found docked with the Smudge Tool. Select the Smudge Tool to bring up the tool's options flyout, then select the Blur Tool.
Paint over the distant elements with the Blur Tool, set with a lower Hardness level of 10-20, to create the effect.
How do I crop my photos in Aviary?
Cropping photos in Aviary is a simple job! To crop your photo, select the Rectangular Selection Tool and drag it around the area you want the image to crop to. Don't worry if you are not happy with your selection. You can always deselect (Select > Deselect) and try again!
Once you are happy with the selection, select Image > Crop Selection to crop your image to your desired area.
A couple notes on resizing for Etsy:
Etsy will resize your image to 430 px wide in your listing, so make sure your image is at least that size or larger. To check the size of your image, select Image > Resize Image to check the proportions of your image.
Etsy will also generate 155 x 125 px, and 75 x 75 px thumbnails from the center of your image, so be sure to include all the pertinent elements of your photo where it won't be cropped in the thumbnails.
(For additional tips on cropping your photos, check out our tutorial on Compositional Cropping!)
How do I sharpen my images?
To create a nice, crisp look to your photos, you can sharpen your photos a couple different ways.
The first method is to simply duplicate your layer (Layer > Duplicate Layer), and apply the Sharpen filter to it. The Sharpen filter can be found under the Filter tab.
The filter will apply a very harsh sharpening effect to your layer. But don't fear! By adjusting the Alpha of this layer from the Layers panel, you can adjust the amount of sharpening you apply to your image.
Phoenix also allows you to sharpen only the edges of your image.
Instead of applying the Sharpen filter to your duplicated layer, apply the Find Edges filter. 
The image will look all funky at first, but do not feat! Simply set this layer's blend mode to Screen from the Layers panel to apply precision sharpening!
When you're finished editing your photo, select File > Export Image to export your creation to your computer all shiny and ready to upload to Etsy!
As each image will need a different approach to processing, the best practice is to experiment with the various methods and see what's best for your particular photo!
You can upload up to five photos per item, so play around with different angles and crops to give your buyers as many views of your items as possible!
Happy sales!
Now you can create custom effects in Aviary's Effects Editor, Peacock save them as blackboxes and then directly import them into Aviary's image editor, Phoenix. What this means is now you can have an UNLIMITED amount of image filters and effects can be used since they are user generated.
When you are in Phoenix and click the Filters Dropdown you will notice the option to Import Custom Filters
These filters were created by the Aviary community using Aviary's effects editor, Peacock.
Choosing an effect from the blackbox library
I have chosen to use the T-shirt Template created by mpeutz
Once the effect is selected you are given the option to tweak the effect:
The applied effect looks like this:
And the final product
To learn more about Peacock's Blackboxes you can check out the userwiki for documentation
We recently updated Phoenix, Aviary's image editor, so anyone can use all the fonts on their computer (and open other people's files, even if they dont have the font).
This was particularly tricky because our site is collaborative and we didn't want anyone to have a bad experience when they were opening a shared file that contained a font missing on their computer.
Want to learn more? Here's the full discussion in our forums.
I just got word from our publisher that our first image-editing tutorial book by the veritable Meowza is now at the warehouse and on it's way to all major retail stores (and Amazon)! It's beautifully illustrated with Meowza's work and very easy to follow. We are truly proud of having a tangible book in stores that teaches people how to perform photo editing in Aviary (using Phoenix). 
We tried to be as open as possible in writing it, so while we obviously used Aviary for the examples, the techniques described are also useful in general, for other layer-based image editing web apps (and of course, for Photoshop and GIMP users as well)!
Pre-order it on Amazon today!
Great job Meowza!!
Hey folks, just a mini-update: As part of our pre-launch prep, we have just released a set of 42 tutorials for beginners and experts a like, explaining how to use Aviary to achieve certain effects.
Check out the full list here!
Here are some of my personal favorites:
Understanding Layers (beginners)
Read the tutorial
Converting Day into Night (expert)
Read the tutorial
Wrapping images around curves on a shirt (expert)
Read the tutorial
These were all written by our very own crazed feline, Meowza. He made them as cross-platform as possible. These can be used for Photoshop and GIMP without too much trouble, and even some other web-based editors. 
If you're an educator or teacher these are excellent (and free) to use for the purposes of sharing in your class to introduce students to different concepts in image editing. And of course the Phoenix editor itself is now available for your students to use.
They are sorted from beginner through expert, check out pages 2-3 for intermediate effects and 4-5 for some of the more advanced effects.
A lot more to come, including video tutorials and user submissions!
Well, it seems we weren't alone in watching the US Vice Presidential debates last week. I'm also sure we weren't alone in noticing the intense sexual chemistry between Joe "Six-Pack" Biden and Sarah "Nukeyoolar" Palin. We couldn't help but wonder what might have happened if their podiums had been any closer? We needed to find out.
Aviary tracked down world-famous DNA specialist Meowza Katz, currently enjoying retirement at an old age facility in Florida, and convinced him to get back in the game. We captured a live video feed of the horror that transpired...
View the sources and full layered file
Sources:
Meowza is so good, he was even able to generate a shot of Jarah Bilen, Soseph Paden's twin sister:
View the sources and full layered file
Sources:
Kudos to the awesome Ronald Jenkees for allowing us to use his new single Stay Crunchy. You can get the full MP3 tracks at his store.
An additional kudos to the awesome Mike Peutz, who made the snazzy video intro for us.
Standard disclaimer: For those of you new to this blog, this was not created in Photoshop. It was created in Aviary, a suite of online web applications. You can sign up for the current beta at http://a.viary.com. We're currently allowing a limited number of people to register (without needing to wait).
Sign up here!
It's been a very busy past few weeks for us. In addition to the new team addition, we've also been furiously working on improving all currently released tools AND gearing up for the alpha release of 2 new birds (Some users are already seeing access to them in their accounts, but more on those later).
Let's start this off with some new feature enhancements to our image editor, Phoenix! In our next post we'll touch on some of the amazing new features added to Peacock, our visual laboratory (for creating complex patterns and filters).
More Aviary goodness after the jump!
Continue reading full post ...
Great method actors like Emma Watson (of Harry Potter fame) will embed themselves so deeply in a role that they will look, dress and act in part non-stop for the duration of filming, even when the cameras aren't rolling.
Now as Emma Watson prepares for her most challenging role to date, 57-year-old male truck driver Roscuro in the upcoming film, The Tale of Despereaux, she asked Aviary's resident plastic surgeon Meowza to perform the emergency sexandectomy. 
View the sources and full layered file
It's every Harry Potter fan fic writers dream come true! Here's a video of the operation:
This work made heavy use of distorting, blend modes and smoothing.
Sources:
Kudos to Aerosmith for providing the background vocals!
Standard disclaimer: For those of you new to this blog, this was not created in Photoshop. It was created in Aviary, a suite of online web applications. You can sign up for the current beta at http://a.viary.com.
One of the most fantastic things about building a suite of tools around a community, instead of the other way around, is that users are always willing to pitch in and help out others with tutorials and forum assistance. It's our plan to build our applications with a very deep set of community tools, built around forums, wiki-documentation, chat, user-made tutorials and sharable workspaces.
Aviary super star Meowza has already begun paving the way with more than a dozen "photo-phixing" tutorials for other users of Aviary's image editor, Phoenix. Got a specific question on how to make a technique in Phoenix? Ask and ye shall receive.
Unzipping a Kitty
View the full tutorial | Full layered file
Chocolatizing a Statue
View the full tutorial | Full layered file
Cyborg Frog
View the full tutorial | Full layered file
Smoking Woman
View the full tutorial | Full layered file
12 more tutorials after the jump!
Continue reading full post ...
Editor's Note: with the launch of Adobe Photoshop Express, came a flurry of concerned emails from friends and family asking "Have you seen this? Are you concerned for Aviary?" My response each time was 'no - they cater to different markets.' They serve red-eye reducer consumers. We serve more advanced hobbyist creators.
But pictures are worth one thousand words, so we asked Aviary superstar Meowza to do an actual comparison against some of the more well known Flash web apps (Photoshop Express, Picnik, Splashup, Fotoflexer and Aviary) to see whether or not he could recreate one of his fantastic Aviary creations.
Meowza's full review after the jump.
Continue reading full post ...
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Aviary is a powerful suite of browser-based design tools for people who create. Head on over to the Aviary homepage to try the applications out and learn more. It's free to try our tools or sign up!
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