Playing with pictures

Here's my first brooch of the new year featuring one of the very cute kawaii style black cat buttons that I showed you in a recent post.

It is sewn using a gorgeous magenta felt which produces just one huge problem - photographing it!  Magenta, and red too actually, are a total nightmare to capture correctly.  I always use good daylight, taking pictures in our conservatory which is always flooded with light, or I use a white paper lined "light box", but each time the colours come out completely different.

This is the colour my SLR captures.  Using my iphone produces a slightly better shade, but it's still not right and obviously I want my shoppers to see more-or-less the right colours when considering buying!

By chance, I came across a Folksy forum post about photographing items during the darker winter months.  Someone mentioned ipiccy - oh my, what a wonderful little application this is.  I've used various tweaking methods on Picasa quite often - to lighten/brighten or tone down, but ipiccy actually lets you play around with the colours.  Hey presto!  Garish red/pink was magically turned into a shade of magenta so very very close to the actual colour of my new brooch.

Try it out, ipiccy is fabulous.  There's plenty of other tweaking buttons on there too, but the couple I've been playing with are "Hue and Saturation" and "Colours".  I'll be having more of a play with all the other little gadgets over the next few days.