The official Etsy School guide has information on lighting and how to set your aperture. It is all wonderful information. But, what if you have an older camera and you do not want to buy expensive lighting? And who wants to re-shoot photos that you already shot? What about backgrounds?
The easiest and least expensive thing is this: White poster board. If you want an inexpensive way to shoot white backgrounds, buy some poster board. When it gets dirty looking, throw it away and get a new one. Use daylight if you do not have good photography lights. When you shoot, your white background will still be gray. Don't be alarmed. We can fix that. That's where the tricky part comes in. And, it is not hard at all!
If you have photo editing on your computer, you can use it. But here, I am going to introduce you to your new BFF:
Picmonkey.com.
You can easily pop your photos in, lighten and brighten, save them to your desktop and use them in your listings.
Another wonderful tool they have is a collage tool. I tried to use it below, but the images are too big for this forum. You can use it when you need more than 5 photos to show the world how beautiful your item is.
And get this...Picmonkey is FREE!
One of our wonderful members has given me permission to go into her shop and work with her photos. (Thank you teamie)
You will learn how to quickly change this:
to this:
I work on a MAC, so you may have to change a few steps to work with your computer.
I went into her shop and clicked and dragged a few photos onto my desktop. With these black shoes I just needed to lighten the photo to show that they are covered in elegant black sequins.
I pictured where you should go on picmonkey on the left. Click exposure and lighten it up. The only thing that you should not do is change the color. People want to see the true color. Don't forget to save. Then save it to your desktop. All you are doing by lightening them up is fixing what your camera did when it did not let enough light in through the little hole in the lens.( The aperture was too low.)
Here's another:
Now you can see in detail what is really on the pen.
And here is my favorite. This one had to be lightened up, shadows removed and I had to go to sharpen and clean up the focus. Last, I cropped it and guess what? When you crop, the image gets a little bit bigger. A secret bonus, right? Check it out.
This is amazing!
Once you get used to this site, and it is easy-peasy, you will have photos that are bright and inviting. Bright images get picked way more often for treasuries and increase your sales dramatically. You can use the ones that you already have and just clean them up. Isn't that great? Well..what are you waiting for? Get busy! Post what you did on our discussion board so that we can go look. Let's see it, teamies!
These decorative letters were found at Anthro and were cut from vintat books. Very cool. 
