4 Steps to Selling on eBay
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The following tutorial is very bare bones, and based on previous discussions with the friend this was originally written for. So those of you reading it now may find references to things that don't apply to your situation (such as using AOL for your image hosting) or that you don't understand. I will be adding to this as I get time and explaining things in more detail so that this can become a broader resource for all of you. So if you have a question, email me and I'll get it up here. info@treefeathers.com
- Step I: Pictures
- Step II: Upload Pictures to AOL FTP
- Step III: Write Description
- Step IV: List on eBay
Step I: Pictures
1. Take your pictures and get them on your computer (whether you scan actual photos or use a digital camera).
2. Open them in Photoshop or other picture/photo editor (they all basically operate the same way, so you should be able to follow along even with a different program - you may have to explore your menus to find the similar funtion that I describe for Photoshop). Good computer habits would be to make a copy of your pictures in case you mess up making your adjustments, but I get lazy and skip that a lot. If you really really mess up in Photoshop, you can use the "Revert" command in the File menu to undo everything you've done since the file was last saved, and start all over again. Of course that means you lose the things you did right, too, lol... These following steps can be used to fix up just about any photo or scanned image, the first two steps will become like automatic habits as you get used to them - I just kept a sticky note on the computer with the numbers on them till I got used to them:
A. Select "Adjust... Levels" in the Image menu. This is to balance out the contrast in the pic, make it a little stronger and clearer and brighter. Also, if your pictures are ever kind of overcast with a color, like too much red or blue, this will often fix that better than trying to mess with the color settings. In other programs this setting may be called Contrast or something like that.
On average, change it to these settings:
- black (left number): 5 (higher will make the darks stronger, might be necessary if your pic is kind of washed out.)
- white (right number): 250-253 (lower will make the lights/whites brighter - don't go too low or you'll get a "burnout" effect wherever there is white; just use this to brighten a bit - use the grey setting to "lighten" a whole picture)
- grey (middle number): 120-140 as a starting point; if your pic is really dark, try a little more (if you're going over about 180 here, you'd be better to just take a brighter picture or it will become too washed out. Increase the black a little more to balance it if you need to).
B. Select "Sharpen....Unsharp Mask" in the Filters menu. You will see 3 settings, leave the bottom two at 1.6 and 6 as a standard. It's the percentage that you want to adjust. Try starting with about 60-70% - for a really sharp photo it may need as little as 40%. If you are going over 90-100, just take a better picture or you will start getting wierd "sharpened" artifacts in the picture.* It's a good time to Save now, in case you mess up in the next step and need to use the Revert command, you won't lose all you've already done!
If you are working in another program, you will have to see if they give a filter like this. What you DON'T want to use is anything that just says plain old "Sharpen" - you want "Unsharp Mask." What this idiotic terminology means is, when a program "sharpens" the picture, it means it sharpens every single pixel in the image - not the OBJECTS in the picture. Unsharp Mask does that - it sharpens the edges of things in the picture. Play around and see what results you get in your program.
