The Trouble With Pictures

Unless I've made a mistake or there is a software glitch, every eBay listing we have has a picture or two. This post involves difficulties I encounter in getting it right.

The picture to the right is a sepia (ish) photo from the 1920s or so. And what you see is the absolute best I could do with it, and my best fell way short. The actual photograph has richer colors and much more subtle shading - it is a very nice picture. I could not reproduce it accurately - the physical photo looks better than the picture I ended up with.

The problem is lighting. I'm not a professional, and I don't have professional equipment or knowledge. I do have a small light box with "daylight" lamps and also a place close to a window that lets a lot of natural light in. I pick and choose which I think is best, depending on the situation. If you look at one of our listings and it has a black background around the edges, then I used the light box. If it has a light blue background, then I used natural light.

I think light has color. Daylight bulbs, regular bulbs, fluorescent bulbs, sunlight all have their own tint. Sometimes it is reflected off the surroundings, and sometimes not. But even though we don't normally think of light as having color, I'm pretty sure it does, and it changes the way a thing looks when you take a picture of it. This can be very frustrating, especially if you have a bit of a detail oriented streak about certain things.

Every picture I take gets moved from the memory stick to a work area on my computer, then pulled up into Paint Shop Pro 8. Why PSP8? Because that's what I have, no other reason. In PSP I crop it, I want to show the picture and the edges - edges are important to collectors - and not much else. Then I try to make the item on the computer look the same way as the physical item in front of me looks. This is tricky. The last thing I want to do is to doctor something up so that it looks better in the listing than it is in reality because that can lead to a very unhappy customer. At the same time, I don't want to cause someone to under value an item because it doesn't look as good as it should - so I do the best I can to get it right. Most of the time I come up short. Most of the time the picture in the listing does not look as good as the actual item - especially photographs like the one above.

I also resize the picture for the listing - I make it a little smaller. I just started doing that a month or so ago, because I ran into a space storage issue. This was a compromise I hated to make, because I think being able to super size a picture and seeing the details is important for online buyers. But it is a space = money issue, and I had to do it. They're still good size, but just not as huge as they used to be when you click on them.

After I'm done with all that I upload them into software called "Inkfrog", and that is where we create the listings with the pictures, then schedule them to be posted on eBay.

I know I'm not the only who has issues with pictures they use in their desriptions. Some people include a statement in their listings that the item looks better than the photograph, so they must be going through similar frustrations. Pictures are very important, and it is hard to get them exactly right.