OPI Dating a Royal with Heart Of Gold + How I Edit My Pictures -Challenge

I have a bit boring mani to show you guys today so I decided to combine this mani post to a challenge that I got (twice) quite a while ago. But first, let's take a look at that mani!

So this is three coats of OPI Dating a Royal, a royal blue creme, with one coat of OPI Heat Of Gold on top (with base and top coat). Like I said, this is a really simple mani, but I have to say that I still really enjoyed it! I love the combination of royal blue with a touch of gold and as soon as I got both of these polishes, I knew I had to combine them. They are both older OPI polishes, I bought them 2nd hand just recently and I'm glad I did as they are both really nice polishes. I have been missing a gold topper with just a subtle gold effect, so Heart Of Gold will definately have a spot in my stash.

But I said something about a challenge, right?! This challenge of doing a post about how you edit your pictures has been going around in Finnish nail polish blogs and I got it from E-S and Sannu, thank you guys and I'm really sorry this took me quite a while to do...

Anyhow, the rules of this challenge go something like this:
1. Thank the person who challenged you.
2. Do a post where you include an unedited picture and the edited version of the picture. 
3. Describe what it is that you normally do to your pictures when you edit them. What software do you use?
4. Challenge five other bloggers to do this challenge.

So here's an unedited and an edited version of the same picture:

The camera that I use is Canon PowerShot G11 so it's not just a point-and-shoot type of thing, but it's not a single-lens reflex camera either. Actually, it's kinda of something between those two. I'm not sure if I know how to use all the setting in the camera properly as I always seem to be too busy to check the manual (yeah right..), but I manage it allright. I edit my pictures with quite a basic software called Paint.Net. It's free and it's really quite simple, so it works for me!

Unedited version


So first I usually crop the pictures as I'm not too careful about the cropping while taking the pictures and it's so easy to do with the software. After that I might rotate the picture, if I feel like it would look better rotated or if I want some variety among the pictures. I usually also take pictures in different angles, so majority of time, I don't even need to rotate the pictures. For this particular picture, I felt that the polish looked better when the picture was rotated.

After that I resize the pictures to make them smaller and after that I just slightly sharpen the pictures because all the cropping and resizing can make them a bit blurry. Then if the colors aren't correct in the picture, I might adjust contrast or brightness and hue/saturation/lightness as I want the color of the polish to look right in the pictures, but sometimes the color seem so right that these aren't needed. Finally I add the name of my blog next to my ring finger nail.

Edited version
I like to keep the editing process really simple as I feel like it would take too much time otherwise and so I don't do anything too fancy. I'm also quite lazy to edit any loose hairs (or things like that) or fix cuticles or anything like that in the pictures, so I try to have them hairfree and all before I even take the pictures. Couple months ago I had a little cut in my ring finger that was really visible in all of the pics, so I tried to edit that a bit just so you wouldn't have to see it. But all in all, I just want to keep it simple and short, because I'm not too fond of editing.

I'm not gonna challenge anyone per se as this challenge has been around in so many different blogs already, but if you haven't done it yet and feel like doing it, then I challenge you! :)

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