Blogs live not only from their written content, but many of those out there live off their pictures. The most known examples coming to mind are travel and food blogs, fashion and jewelry, sports and news and that’s just the big keywords.
For most creators, this means they take a picture, and as the standard WP image editing is not compatible with pro expectation, they then edit in Photoshop and the like, upload, test the picture, re-edit, re-upload until they have it perfect. At least, that’s my experience. And now there is Photinia to help with just that.
Important editing features
From my experience, there are a few things that keep coming up when preparing an image for the web:
- Fine tuning metrics like exposure, white balance, brightness and colors.
- Adding filter effects to images to make them more appealing and more consistent.
- Cropping pictures so that the right details are in focus
- Resizing images to reduce load times and disc space
- Adjusting specific image sizes to always have the right details visible
- Maybe adding text or elements like a frame to the image
WordPress Standard versus Photinia editing features
WordPress Standard image editor
- Crop
- Resize
- Rotate
- Flip
Photinia image editor
- Crop
- Resize
- Rotate
- Flip
- Different Filters (kind of like on instagram)
- Finetuning:
- Brightness
- Contrast
- Saturation
- Exposure
- Temperature
- Gamma
- Clarity
- Vignette
- Re-open the editor and keep editing
- Edit specific image sizes
Coming soon:
- Text and shapes
- Redaction
Using Photinia
I admit, I often just add the same filter for all images on the blog. Then I know they have the same style and I’m done. But that’s exactly something I can do with Photinia. Sometimes the image still doesn’t fit perfectly, then I can fine-tune the details.
The feature I like most, is that I can close the image, test it in the frontend and then go back to the editor and make further changes. It’s a problem I have with the enhancements the WordPress Block Editor (Gutenberg) offers. It just saves a new picture, but if it’s actually not as good as I had hoped, I have to re-start and remember to delete all my tests. Here, I just keep editing.
There’s also themes that use specific image sizes for example for the archives, and different ones for widgets etc. Now I can choose one image size and only edit this one. Why would I want that? Here is an example:
This happened for example for a blog I was working on for a customer. They wanted to set the featured image once, but show the image the in feed in black&white and only on the single post page in color. The theme had a specific size for the feed, so we would only set a black&white filter for this image size. Now that has to be done every time a featured image is uploaded and set and isn’t done automatically. But depending on the original image, it’s nice to be able to play with the different filters to make sure the image looks its best.
There is one other thing I like – it just looks and feels cool when using the editor. Now that may not be a reason to buy, but it is a reason to keep using. You have to enjoy editing your images, or you will start skipping every now and then.
So is this plugin everything Photoshop is? No, it’s not. The image editor comes with features most users like and use. If your are a photographer though, this won’t be enough. If your are a blogger and want consistency in your images, enhance them somewhat and get the best without needing tools outside WordPress, then this is one of the best options out there.
