How To Create Stunning Images using Pixlr Editor

Most of the bloggers look for tools which will help them create stunning images for their blog. And there is a reason for this.

We know, viewers respond very well to images and more likely to visit your blog if you link up your post with beautiful, creative images. This is a fact and I have been drawn to many blog posts just after looking at the images uploaded at various social media sites.

Remember, when you share your posts on different social media platforms, your blog image becomes the first thing that people notice. Have you ever wondered how certain images stand out in a melee?

And why people get drawn to some images and not others? It is due to the way images have been edited to make these appear stunning.

In the beginning, I did not have any idea how to edit an image. My love for editing started much before I started my own blog. So to make awesome images I began searching and experimenting with various editors available online. Then I came across Pixlr Editor and instantly liked it.

As an online editor, it had a wide range of tools and loads of features that you find in a full-fledged image editor.

How to create stunning images for your blog post? If you have no idea, do not lose heart. You do not have to be an editing genius to create awesome images.

There are many online tools available which will help you create quality images for your blog post. Many bloggers use PicMonkey, this one has many features. However, most of its filters are not free and you have to upgrade to a pro version to access that.

Create Stunning images using Pixlr Editor

So we will focus on Pixlr Editor, which has an astounding number of features which you can use to create lovely images. Let me also tell you that here I am focusing on Pixlr Editor and not Pixlr-o-matic or Pixlr Express.

Before we start using Pixlr Editor, let us find out from where can we get quality photos. The first step in creating stunning images is to use high-resolution pictures.

So our search begins for pictures which meet our requirements. Here is a word of caution. Do not ever search for pictures using Google. You do not know if these pictures are freely available to use. You should go for creative commons websites.

There are plenty of such websites out there and you can easily find pictures that meet your requirements. Personally, I will recommend you to use www.Pexels.com or www.Unsplash.com. Stay safe and do not take images from Google search result.

Let us move over to Pixlr Editor and learn the basics of image editing. Though Pixlr has a mobile app, here I will be talking about its web version: https://pixlr.com/editor/

Now click on the “open image from computer”. Choose the image you want to edit.

If you are using images from the two sites that I mentioned above, chances are these can be really big ones. Try to optimize them (compress). Using heavy images (of 2 or 3MB) can considerably increase your post loading time which can negatively impact your site’s performance.

How to optimize the images? Use https://tinypng.com/ to compress.

Look at the main menu bar. There are two options: adjustment and filters. We will concentrate on these two because our aim is to create visually stunning images. These two options will help us to achieve our objective.

Steps

1. Click on adjustment. The first option in the drop-down menu is brightness and Contrast. Click on brightness and you get a box to increase or decrease the brightness.
   Most images that you see on social media if they have a white background, they are very bright. Increase it but not so much that it hides the objects.
   Contrast makes the white whiter and the darks darker. So use this one with caution. Moving the slide bar up and down will make you see the difference in your pic.
2. The next is Hue and saturation. Click on that and you will get three options: hue, saturation, and lightness.
   Again, move the slide bar up and down to increase or decrease the values of each one. If you have already increased the brightness, do not play around with lightness.
3. Below Hue and saturation, you have color balance. Remember, the three main colors of any object in Red, Green, and Blue, which we call as RGB. The value of each is indicated.
   As my image has a green plant, I increased the green a bit to make it deeper and lively.

Similarly, there are other options below hue and saturation. Check each one and see how these make colors in your image stand out. If you make a mistake or do not like the change, click on Edit and choose “undo”.

The next option on the menu bar is “filter”. Use this to add different types of filters to your image.

1. Each option has a different effect on the image. “Blur” will make your image look slightly blurred. I have chosen “Gussian blur” and you can see how my image now looks.
   You can increase or decrease the effect by moving the slide bar.
   
2. Similarly, this one is “Water swirl” effect.
   
3. “Mimic HDR” filter brings out the colors as sharp and clear. Check out my image here. So you can experiment with others and see for yourself how it changes your image.
   On the left-hand side of the editor, you will see a number of tools which can be used to crop, choose a part of the image, smudge an area, or pinch a part of an object. But, this toolbox is beyond the scope of this post.
   However, all the things that I have told you here can be used to make an awesome image. There is one more thing before I conclude. If the original image is huge, say 2500 * 2950, try cropping the image into smaller ones. That way, you can get 3 or 4 images from a single one.

The one I used here is, in fact, a cropped one.

The original one is here.  Also, mark the difference after using the editor. Now tell me, which image editor do you use?

[N.B.: This was my guest post. Read it here. ]