eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

Doctor Your Photos

Fix up your photos after they’ve been taken.

There’s more to image preparation than simple crops and rotations. When presentation really matters, you may want to take a few extra minutes to make your auction photos look perfect.

Tip

Be careful not to doctor the photo so much that it misrepresents the item being sold. Try to strike a balance between making your photos look professional and setting a reasonable expectation [Hack #50] with your bidders.

Regardless of how you take your photos [Hack #70] and get them into your computer [Hack #73] , you’ll eventually end up with one or more image files. But before you send them to eBay or upload them to your web server [Hack #76] , you’ll need to prepare your images, and for that, you’ll need an image editor.

Image Editors

A good image editor will be able to do the following:

• Read, write, and convert all popular image file formats [Hack #73]

• Basic image manipulation, such as crop, resize, and rotate

• Basic touch-up, including clone, line, and text tools

• Basic color adjustments, such as contrast, brightness, and color balance

• Batch processing (converting or modifying a group of files in one step)

Here are some of the image editors currently available, including both free and commercial applications:

Adobe Photoshop (www.adobe.com).

Easily the best photo editor available, Photoshop will do just about anything you’ll ever need when it comes to processing auction photos. The Windows and Macintosh versions are practically identical, ...