I recently bought a pretty cool camera. It’s still a digital camera, but it allows you to customize a lot of options that are typically only adjustable in expensive DSLR cameras, including shutter speed, aperture, exposure value and more! Although it’s not super expensive, it still is a nice lil camera with plenty of features for me. That being said, I still need to edit my photos before I publish them (most of the time!) When I look back at some earlier posts of this blog, I cringe at some of the photos that were published. However, editing photos does not have to be a very difficult or time-consuming endeavor. All you need is about 5 minutes & Inkscape!

You can get Inkscape for free here. FYI, I’m not being compensated by them for this post. I am just a big fan and wanted to share this information with you all. Even if you are not a blogger (or anyone who publishes photos online), you may need to edit digital photos of your kids before you print out a bunch to hand out to friends/family. So, if you want to see how I use Inkscape to quickly spruce up the sharpness and lighting of an image, check out my tutorial!

Improve your blog photos with Inkscape (for free!)

1. First, I like to improve the sharpness. So I go to Filter – Image Effects – Sharpen More. If that’s enough sharpness, I stop there. If I feel the image could use more, I will use Filter – Image Effects – Sharpen.
2. Next, I like to adjust some of the color tones of the image. I use Extensions – Raster – Level. I will usually leave the White Point and Black Point values at their default values, and play around with the Gamma value until I get a brighter image.
3. Lastly, I use Extensions – Raster – Normalize to automatically adjust the color values. This usually makes the colors look more vibrant and more realistic.

And that’s it! Only three steps to create such a great improvement in image quality. The adjusted image is much sharper and much brighter, with more realistic colors! Not bad, right?

And don’t forget, Inkscape is free and there are a ton of other tutorials out there in blog land for Inkscape. Happy editing!

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