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[T1053]To Take Better Pictures

by Gregg Pennington, Gre

A photograph may be worth well more than 1000 words when the item being sold is for example, a rare coin. Potential bidders can view the coin in close up detail, and verify the seller's stated description of the item, as well as any certificates of authenticity. Even less tangible items like software sell much better in auctions where a photograph of the box is provided. If the item you are selling has any damage or flaws, make sure to document this with a picture.

If you will just be an occasional seller, and you don't own a digital camera, it is very easy and inexpensive to have your 35mm photos digitized. If you will be holding regular auctions with photographs of your items, you may want to purchase a digital camera. An inexpensive digital camera will work fine; 3 megapixels will be more than adequate for most auction photos.

For taking online auction photos, you should choose a medium resolution, (for example 1024x768 pixels). This should allow you to get a good sharp image without a long upload time. When photographing smaller items, use the macro setting on your digital camera which allows you to get closer to the item. This will create a narrow depth of field, bringing your item into sharp focus, and minimizing background distractions. If your camera will not take extreme close up photos, don't worry; you can always crop and enlarge your pictures later. Your goal is for the featured item to take up as much of the photograph as possible.

Choosing the right background for your auction photographs can turn average pictures into powerful selling tools. Most importantly, the background should not distract attention from the item being photographed. Your background should be plain and contrast with your item. Using too light a background color with a light colored item can cause the picture to appear "washed out". Remove any clutter from view of the camera, and smooth out any wrinkles in a fabric backdrop if using one. Hardwood floors can be excellent backgrounds for a variety of auction photos, as they create a warm, natural glow in your pictures, yet do not draw attention away from the item for sale. A background that complements your item will make your photographs look professional and could influence potential bidders to favor your item over other similar offerings.

If possible, experiment with taking some of your auction photos outdoors on an overcast day, or indoors near a window. The natural soft lighting will show more detail in your pictures. If you must work indoors, consider using a tripod, allowing you to get good pictures without using a flash. A flash can cause an unwanted glare when photographing a reflective item. When using an artificial light source, try different light positioning until you get the best possible illumination.

If you are photographing something two dimensional like postage stamps or baseball cards, you will get the most revealing photographs shooting your item straight on. For other more three dimensional subjects, shooting at an angle will let you maximize the perception of depth. Experiment with varying angles until you find the one you prefer.

When photographing large items for auction like vehicles, many of the previously mentioned rules apply. The car should be photographed from a variety of angles, and there should be as little clutter as possible in the background; especially trash, or anything else that could give a negative impression of the value of the vehicle. If you are like most of us, you probably don't have a suitable place to photograph an automobile indoors. Since you will be shooting outdoors, choose either a cloudy day or the hours of dusk or twilight for the best clarity and the most attractive photos. You will have to stand back a bit to get an entire vehicle in frame, so try to pick a place where you won't have people walking through your background.

Now you have some fantastic photos of your item or items for sale, and you have them saved on your computer in either JPG or GIF format using a descriptive name (e.g., painting_2.JPG). Ebay offers basic and enhanced picture services. Enhanced picture services allow you to crop, rotate, and adjust the brightness and contrast of your photos before uploading. You can also upload them to your own web service if you prefer; however, eBay requires that you use HTML in your listing to display more than one externally hosted picture. There are several good websites that offer free image hosting service for remote hosting of pictures for auction sites such as Ebay and Yahoo.

The number of pictures you show in your auction will vary, depending on the type of item being sold, and what your competition is doing. Search some auction listings to see what competitors are doing with their photographs, and how many they are using. Put yourself in the place of a potential buyer; is your listing providing enough detail both visual and written to make your buyer feel comfortable bidding? Will the winning bidder be satisfied that the item they received was accurately portrayed in your listing, and therefore leave better feedback? In highly competitive markets, detailed, professional-looking photographs can give you the edge you need to be successful in online auctions.

Would you like to take better pictures than your camera can? You can easily make your photos look as if they were taken with a much more expensive camera! PhotoAcute Studio will help you obtain amazing image quality without changing your camera by making images look sharper, cleaner and with less artifacts. Just take several images instead of a single one, and PhotoAcute Studio will produce an amazingly clean final shot with amazingly deep colors, super-resolution and clearly visible fine details. You can even increase depth-of-field by taking several shots and stacking them together - a highly valuable feature for any serious macro photographer!

PhotoAcute Studio () allows professional photographers and photo enthusiasts to get better pictures with more spatial resolution and less noise and other artifacts (such as chromatic aberration and geometric distortions) with just a slight change to the workflow. Improve your photos as if you had much better camera!

Using the innovative RAW-in-RAW-out type of processing, PhotoAcute Studio can be used together with your favorite RAW processing and post-processing suite instead of replacing it.

While there is no way to add missing detail to a single picture, modern image processing algorithms can do wonders when combining several images and pulling hidden image details to increase MTF and visible spatial resolution. PhotoAcute Studio does not sharpen or super-size your images. Instead, it pulls every little detail from several shots taken from the same point to produce a single final image in super-resolution. You can even use this technique to obtain a photo-quality super-resolution shot by combining several frames of a webcam or a video camcorder. If you have enough frames, you can even print it poster-size - a hopeless mission without PhotoAcute Studio!

Don't let the numerous sharpness enhancers and image resize tools discourage you! PhotoAcute Studio provides a real, measurable increase in MTF numbers that can be proven with independent analysis tools such as Imatest. Have a look here () at the MTF graphs of the original picture and of the one processed with PhotoAcute Studio.

PhotoAcute Studio is not limited to just increasing spatial resolution. It squeezes every bit of extra information available in the several shots to produce a final image that strikes you with its clean appearance, fine details and deep colors. While HDR processing is hardly new, PhotoAcute Studio still combines color and exposure information from several images to produce a final image with naturally deep colors and no under- or overexposed areas.

Combining several images allows discriminating between noise and the genuine details of an image. The unique noise reduction technique applied by PhotoAcute Studio produces naturally clean images with a smooth background and all fine details carefully preserved. Unlike still-image noise reduction algorithms, PhotoAcute Studio applies motion-based noise reduction similar to the ones used in movie production.

Macro photographers will undoubtedly appreciate the increased depth of field resulting from image stacking. Simply taking several pictures with slightly shifted focus and combining the images in PhotoAcute Studio produces sharp images with an amazingly wide dynamic range and deep depth-of-field that is hard or impossible to achieve otherwise.

Producing sharp, vivid, super-resolution images out of several pictures and supporting RAW file formats of all major photo manufacturers, PhotoAcute Studio is irreplaceable for any serious photographer or photo enthusiast. Download the free evaluation version at:

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Both Gregg Pennington & Jan Leary are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Gregg Pennington has sinced written about articles on various topics from Finances, Poor Credit and Finances. . Gregg Pennington's top article generates over 27100 views. to your Favourites.

Jan Leary has sinced written about articles on various topics from Cover Letter, How to Sell on Ebay. Jan Leary has been a professional photographer since 1995, specializing in landscape, architecture and macro photography. He is enthusiast and early adopter of advanced digital photo techniques, such as high dynamic range imaging and. Jan Leary's top article generates over 2400 views. to your Favourites.