Little Birds and a SHAZAM! moment

This post will focus on two things: some beauty and some frustration

First, the beauty: My sweet little frames I found for $13!

My maiden name was "Short". Not that it was short in length but Short as in, "Hi my name is Kim Short, what's yours?" I married an Italian. His last name is really, really long. Why did I change my name????? The first few months when I would sign my name, I did it with such pride and love. And then I realized I had to do this for the rest of my life.

17 letters from start to finish. Yikes!

Guess what my signature looks like now?

K scribble,  U scribble, add two big loops for the l's, scribble,  add two dots for the i's. Done!

I found out that our family name means "little birds" in Italian. Such a beautiful language and I like to think that our name reflects the fact that two little birds got together and made one great family!

I would love to say that the little bird frames that I found yesterday were purposefully bought because of the family name. It truly did not hit me until I was telling someone about the cute little bird frames that I found yesterday! DOH!

I hung these on either side of the door so before you fix your hair in my silver tray wreath, your realize you are visiting the house of two birds! Or bird brain; I won't say my husband is a full fledged nut like me, (you have read this blog haven't you?) but he has to be at least one feather shy of a full pillow to have married me!

This leads me to another part of this post: picture posting on blogger.

I have been very frustrated by the fact that I edit my pictures in Lightroom and they look so nice and crisp and clear in the final export.  Then I load them into Blogger and blow them up to extra large and kablammity blam, blurry, crappy pictures. GRRRRRR....

So I asked in one of my posts if anyone had any advice?  Well, guess what? Nita from Mod Vintage Life answered me. Not only did she answer, she actually took time to download a picture from the post, analyze it, and find out what I was doing wrong. So like she spent about 20 minutes analyzing the problem and then took another 10 minutes to send me an email explaining the issue and the solution! Nita rocks!! I think I love her.

So here is what I am talking about:

This is how I would have imported them: I made them purposefully smaller on export than usual so you can see the difference better and see how changing the size makes such a huge difference. I load them in just like I saved them and then choose the "extra large" option for display and this is what happens:

 Nita told me that I had been exporting them to be about 4"x4" so when I blew them up in Blogger, that made them to grainy.


So I went back and saved them like she told me and SHAZAM! I don't need my glasses!

Here they are saved to be 8x11. Better huh!! Nita have I told you you rock??

What is this magic I speak of? 

1.  First you want to save the picture either the exact size you want them to appear or larger.

2.  Since I use Lightroom, I stay in "Library",  highlight the photos I want to export and then hit EXPORT on the bottom left.  I could not find how to do this in Lightroom on my own so I googled it and found how to do it in about 3 minutes. 

3. That brings up a menu where it will ask you to name the file and if you scroll down you can name the size you want. 

 Multiply the size by 72 so you get the correct amount of pixels.

 For example, 8 x 72 = 576 and 11 x 72 = 792 so an 8x11photo should be saved as  792 x 576 pixels.  

I got this little piece of info from Nita as well when she sent me this link http://www.kazdesignworks.ca/images.html

4. You also need to change your resolution to 72 pixels per inch (ppi) because that, apparently is what the web uses so you can get quickie downloads!

5. If you use other editing software like Nita does then, and I quote her, "You go to the top menu bar and select image and scroll down to image size. A pop up box will come up where you can alter the size".

So now YOU know because I believe in paying it forward! 

Thank you Nita for the time and effort you took to help me solve this issue. 

Please, Please, Please head over to her blog and give her some love. 

Until tomorrow,

Tweet! Tweet!

Always being renewed,