I want this resource page to be a place where you can learn to enhance the images I put out USING FREE SOFTWARE so you can use more of them in your worship enviroment.

 

* Just for people's information, Adobe now offers special pricing for religious and non profit organizations. So now you can get the adobe photoshop software that normally costs $700 at or below $250.00. If you go to http://www.campustech.com/c/campust/23893.html?mv_pc=569 you can write or call them more about it. I would DEFINTELY recommend every church own this piece of software.

 

There may be times when the background is too dark for your projection environment. You could always try lifting the brightness up of the photo with a photo editor program but you will lose detail and contrast. In reality, that is the worst way to brighten an image. The best way is to use something called levels. There is a great online photo editor to use to do this if you do not own one (like photoshop, etc).

 

1. Go to http://www.onlinephototool.com/bewerk.php

2. It will ask you to run the java applet. Click 'run.'

3. The photo editor program should now open.

4. Click the folder icon in the top left of the editor, to open your image. Click browse to get the image from your harddrive. Find the image you want and double click on it to open it in the editor.

5. Now choose 'image>adjustments>levels' from the menu at the top of the editor.

6. Move the white and grey arrows underneath the histogram to the left like in the picture below. It is a good idea to first move the white arrow to the left a little to first bright the image. Then slide the middle grey one to the left to bring out the details in the image.

 

 

 

7. Click okay in the levels popup box when your happy with the result.

8. Now click on 'image>jpeg properties' from the top menu.

9. Drag the jpg slider to about 97-98 quality. This is very important so that you do not lose any quality once you save the image.

10. Now click on 'file>save on disk' from the top menu and save the new file to anywhere you want on your computer.

 

There may be times when the background is too busy or its too bright to use with white text overlays. You could always just drop the brightness down, but you often lose contrast by doing that. Plus, you cannot specify which color to use as an overlay color (ie. you have a blue image set that is busy and want to put a blue solid color over it to match the blues in the image set). In this set I am just going to use black for the example as an overlay color.

 

 

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FAUXTO is a great new free online photo editor that mimicks photoshop in quite a few ways. Although this tutorial may look long or complicated, once you do it once you'll see how quick and simple it is.

 

1. Go to faxuto.com

 

2. You can enter my account info to login :

username: mikeh000@hotmail.com

password: fauxto

 

3.  Launch fauxto

 

4. Go to file>open web image

Click the browser button to get an image from your computer and then click on 'ok'

 

5. You will see a layers box on the bottom right of the screen.

 

6. Click the + icon at the bottom of this layers box.

 

7. Click the double sided arrow that is between the black and white boxes on the left side of the screen in the tools box. This will make the black color active instead of the white color.

 

 

 

 

 

8. Click the paintbucket icon in the tools box.

 

 

9. Using this paintbucket tool, click inside the image area to make this new layer you have created completely black.

 

10. In the layers box you will see your layer, titled untitled-2, with a completely black thumbnail next to it.

 

11. Go to the opacity area of the layers box where it says 100, and change the number down to a level you feel comfortable with. You will see what it looks like in the image area as you input different numbers. A number of 50 for opacity is usually good.

 

12. Click file>save web image

Choose the 'to computer' tab.

Click the save button.

 

Save this new file to your computer.