HOW I EDIT MY INSTAGRAM PICTURES (PART I)

Plenty of you guys have asked "how do you edit your pictures?" and I tend to give short non-informative answers. Not because I was reluctant on sharing my magic, but it takes too much explanation for me to do, also, it's incomprehensible if I don't show a step by step visual of the process. So with much demand, I have finally made a tutorial for you guys!


I am terrible at giving instructions so I hope these are brief enough to make sense to anyone :') IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU READ THE TEXTS along the way because most of the visuals are just basic instructions with no detailed explanation. I use 2 main softwares to edit my pictures and those are paint.NET (not Windows Paint) and Photoscape. Everything I do here are all self-taught and please do not condemn me if I did anything professionally incorrect lol.. tell me kindly LOL. I have been using Photoscape for more than 6 years so I can at least say I am pretty familiar with it.

EDIT YOUR PICTURE INTO A TRANSPARENT PIC

SOFTWARE: paint.NET

Okay so, open up your paint.NET and open up the image that you want to edit into a transparent picture. If you have a one-color background, the magic wand is your best friend. It easily erases the background in just one click. However, if you have a background like mine here (has shadows, has other pigments etc), it's gonna be a hassle to use this tool. You'll see why.

So usually, once you click on the background, the blue area will most likely affect the zone that you do not want to erase due to the tolerance percentage of your magic wand.

And so you will have to adjust the tolerance until the blue area stopped showing up at the areas you wish to keep. You can continuously cut the background part by part, to cut; press CTRL + X or click on that scissor icon at the horizontal top bar. However, it will mostly leave messy finishes, as you can see, the blue area doesn't completely cover the background, there are edges that are not covered, which therefore will leave residues that you will have to manually erase yourself (use the eraser to do so).

Which is why at this point, when it comes to erasing backgrounds like mine, it's better to just opt for the classic eraser lol. It is important that you put the hardness at 100% or else your erasing will end up with blurry edges instead of clean edges.

As you can see, when it comes to erasing the backgrounds, I usually start with an extremely large brush width eraser. I then change the width smaller as I get closer to the area that I wish to maintain. It saves more time that way.

Of course there will be those irritating bunch of hair that stood out, giving you more trouble to erase the background. What I learnt throughout my 1+ year of using this software is that.. the magic wand is your best friend when it comes to this. Just keep on clicking the area you wish to cut while adjusting the tolerance level so it doesn't affect the zone you want to keep. Continue doing it until you are satisfied with the finish. Or you can cut just erase the entire bunch of hair LOL.


HOW TO SAVE:
When you are done cutting the background, and you are ready to save it, if the image format is not png, change it to png. That's how you maintain the transparency. If you save it on other formats (gif format is fine) it will save your image with a white background instead of a transparent one.

Once you click save, this save configuration window will appear, and when it does, you gotta make sure your background has this grey grid, instead of a plain white background. This means you have selected the right format for your transparent image.

And you are finally done cropping your fabulous self out of that ugly ass background! Lets move on to more mediocre fun, shall we!?

HOW TO ADD A NEW BACKGROUND ON
YOUR TRANSPARENT IMAGE

Okay so, if you don't want to keep your image as that transparent layer only, you can add a new background to it. You can either get a background of your choice through a simple google search, or if you have plenty of time/knowledge/resources.. go ahead and make your own original background.

Once you got the background you want to blend with your clear image, go ahead and select "layers" from the top left menu (horizontal), insert the background you want by clicking "Import from file" and choose the image you want to include.

Once you import the bg (background) it will overlap with your transparent image. So trick here is, you drag that bg layer down (refer to the small layer windows located at the bottom right of your screen) and your clear image should now be on top of your bg.

As soon as you drag that bg layer down, your image will probably become an imbalanced eyesore. This is because one of your image is either bigger or smaller than the other. But fret not, you could just crop the shit out of it. For this, choose the "rectangle select" tool (from the the left vertical bar) and point the arrow at the edge of your image, shape it around the area you want to keep. Then go to "image" and click "crop to selection".

If you find yourself unable to do ANYTHING, click on the "deselect" icon, at the top left horizontal bar and just repeat the steps above. SO THERE YOU HAVE IT.


HOW TO SAVE:
Saving this image is ez. Do it the same way as I mentioned on the transparent image's above, but instead of png, choose jpeg/jpg, click save, and then the other tiny 'save' window will appear, click flatten then you are done bb.

Or if you are not done with the editing yet, you can keep it under the pdn format, so you can open it later and edit it from where you last stopped. However, you cannot upload a pdn file, which is why you have to save it in a jpg format.

That is it for now! Because this tutorial is already so damn long, I decided to divide it into two separate parts. CLICK HERE for PART II

It took me a while to complete this tutorial so I hope it helps even just a little bit lol. Feel free to ask me anything, you can leave a comment below or send me an ask on my new ask.fm. I would be happy to help!



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Contact me at angelZ.png@outlook.com