Do your photos need more zing? Give them a little “Bling”

It’s no secret that the quality of a store’s product images can have a significant impact on its sales. If you’ve invested time and effort to refine your product images, then you’ve likely found image editing can be a labor-intensive process, especially when removing and replacing backgrounds or improving the overall quality. So when I recently came across Vangie Beal’s ECommerce-Guide review of Bling! It, a new program Beal claimed could be used to easily accomplish these tasks in just a few minutes, I had to try it for myself.

As it turns out, Beal was right. While nothing compares to having professional-looking product photos to work with, Bling! It can help you correct less than stellar images with a few clicks of your mouse, and doesn’t require you to be a graphic design whiz. Most notable—and even fun—is the edge finding tool, which dissects your image into pieces (like a jigsaw puzzle), and allows you to adjust the tool’s level of detail as you work. Clicking inside of these pieces using the local brush applies a mask to these areas, and removes them from the final image.

When giving it a test run, I decided to use a slightly blurry photo that needed both a sharper focus and for the background to be removed. By using the edge finding tool and local brush to remove the background, setting a solid background color, applying the sharpen image option and adding a standing shadow, in about five minutes my photo went from this:

to this:

All-in-all, Bling! It requires a minimal investment of time to achieve very valuable results.

Bling! It can be downloaded as a 15-day free trial from Vertus’ website, and it sells for $49.95 (available for Windows only). Until February 21, 2008, Vertus is kindly extending a discount of $5 to Yahoo! Store blog readers. Use the coupon code BIYSTORE on the order page to take advantage of this offer.

Remember, having good product photos to work with is always the best option. Using a lightbox to achieve good lighting with virtually no background, or paying attention to lighting, focus, placement and angle, and positioning your product against a high-contrast, solid color background (if you plan to remove the background later) will only benefit you and save more time when editing your image. Often, though, product photos come from manufacturers and may not always be of the best quality. Bling! It is a nice option for merchants who would rather not re-shoot product photos, making it easy to display attractive images that can help generate sales.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business