Another Web Tool – Splashup

As I continue to find new tools online, I will write about them here if they are applicable to the real estate business. With as much real estate photography talk as is going on here, I though I should share this great tool. Toady I will be writing about the website Splashup.com. This website uses a flash tool for online photo editing that ties into your Picasa, Flicker, Facebook accounts or works with images on your computer. You can also create a Splashup.com account and store your images on their servers. I didn’t create an account, but I did try to color correct an image using their tool, and posted my experiences below.

First, I started with a basic office photo. This photo came from a Realtor that I work with setting up virtual tours and is an actual photo used. There is no color correction here and all I did was add the text in the top right corner using splashup.com before saving the image to my computer. I had a choice of file type, compression and matte color to choose from while saving, which was a nice feature. I saved the image at 100% quality and was a bit depressed to see that some of the graininess was still present. I think that the jpg compression built into flash is at fault, though.

Here is the image after working with the brightness and contrast for less than five minutes. Then I changed the text in the top corner to “After” and saved this version to my computer again at 100%. I think that this tool greatly brought out the color of this rather dark picture. Needless to say, for less than five minutes, this tool is a great help to anyone away from their personal computer.

This last photo was edited on my personal computer (also in about 5 minutes) using the photo manipulation software called The GIMP. I personally think that this is by far better than the either of the other two, but you can’t always get to your personal computer to make these touch-ups. This is when an online tool is a great option, especially one of this quality.

One last image, below, is a screen shot of splashup.com while working on this image. You can see many familiar tools and options if you are at all familiar with any image working program. All in all, this is a great tool to use for simple to advanced photo manipulation. Working with a desktop app, such as photoshop, corel draw or the GIMP is still great (and faster) but many do not have these programs. Working with SplashUp.com can make your properties photos shine, but for now I don’t know if it is up to par with a desktop application. What do you think?