Hello all!

I’m back from an impromptu trip to the island of Åland, making the most of my last days of independence. I happened to arrive on a national holiday and the whole city of Mariestad felt like an abandoned film set. After walking for a few hours I found the only open restaurant on the whole island, a pizzeria that served excellent hair. The next day I got to see one of the world’s two remaining authentic pirate flags, hand-stitched and sun bleached, which off course completely blew my mind. All in all, it was a good getaway.

Now I’m back I home in Sweden, editing photos and counting the days until Monday.

I wanted to share with you a few of my thoughts about editing manicure photos. They are, after all, the core of a manicure blog and I really enjoy the process of making them both pretty and colour accurate. Being true to the original colour of the polish is always my top priority, and I guarantee you I would never post a picture that doesn’t depict the polish as truthful as possible.

I currently use a very old version of Adobe Lightroom. Here are some some screen shots of my standard colour corrections, for your reference:

LNWY was a particularly difficult polish to edit because it has so many different colours. In the before-photo you’ll notice that the red glitters are too saturated, the yellow ones are too bright, and the base colour a bit too dark:

The after-picture is more truthful, no? But I still have very much to learn. For example, how to avoid the strange yellow line at the bottom of my nail, and how to make the closeups less grainy. But I think the latter is a problem with my camera’s lens.

I want to stress that if my skin tone looks weird on some of the photos, it probably is because I had to chose between a colour accurate manicure and a colour accurate hand. I will always go for the colour accurate manicure.

The last step of editing is usually enhancing brightness and desaturating my skin tone to make it less dominant, like below. Sometimes I make the shadows less dark too, but that’s really tricky – if I overdo it my hands look like something that crawls around on Halloween.

If you have any tips for me, or any questions, I’d love to hear them. Leave me a comment or drop a line here. Now I shall continue editing my next manicure post! Thanks for stopping by.