Recolouring and shaping pictures in Publish by Zaweba

A photo that looks lovely on its own can look out of place on a page. It might be too dark beside the text, too colourful next to a calm design, or simply the wrong shape for the layout. Publish by Zaweba has a small set of picture adjustments that fix the most common of these problems without leaving the app.

You can recolour a picture to greyscale, sepia, washout, or black and white, adjust its brightness and contrast, and give it a picture shape, an ellipse or a rounded rectangle, with a border and shadow that follow the shape. The stored picture is never changed, so you can always go back.

Recolouring with a purpose

Greyscale turns a photo into shades of grey. It can make a group of mismatched photos look like a set, give a serious tone to a notice, or save colour ink on a page printed at home. Sepia gives a warm, brownish old photo look, ideal for anniversaries, history pages in a newsletter or a vintage themed invitation.

Washout makes a picture very pale. That is the setting for a picture that sits behind text, such as a faint photo of the venue behind the details on a flyer, or a watermark style image on a certificate. The text stays readable because the picture has been pushed into the background.

Black and white is starker than greyscale, reducing the picture to pure black and white. It suits logos, line drawings and bold graphic effects, and it can rescue a scanned signature or sketch that came in with a grey, uneven background.

Brightness and contrast

Photos taken indoors are often a little dark, and photos taken on a bright day can look flat. A small lift in brightness or a touch more contrast can make a picture look much better on the page. Go gently; a large change tends to lose detail in the dark or bright areas.

It helps to judge pictures next to each other. If a newsletter page has three photos, adjusting them so they look similar in brightness makes the whole page feel more finished.

Picture shapes

An ellipse frame turns a photo into a circle or an oval. That is the classic look for a portrait of a speaker, a member of the month or a team photo row. A rounded rectangle softens the corners, giving a friendlier, more modern feel than sharp corners, and suits menus, invitations and brochures.

A border and a shadow follow the shape, so a round photo gets a round border and a round shadow. That makes it look properly cut out rather than sitting in an invisible square. Shadows in Publish are hard edged, which keeps PDFs vector and crisp in print.

Shaped pictures still crop inside their frame. If someone's face ends up off centre in a circle, double-click and move the picture until it sits in the middle.

Nothing is lost

Every one of these adjustments is applied on top of the picture stored in your publication. The stored picture is never changed. Recolour a photo to sepia today and you can set it back to full colour next month. That makes it safe to experiment, and it means a picture reused on two pages can look different on each.

For heavier work, such as removing a blemish or cutting a person out of a background, there is a round trip to Paint by Zaweba, which sends the picture to Paint and brings your saved changes back into Publish.

A little adjustment goes a long way. In Publish by Zaweba, a washout picture behind a headline or a round portrait with a thin border is often all a page needs to look designed rather than assembled.