FotoFuze Professional

Fuze with Style. Background Style!

It's 2014 and we thought we'd kick it off with a great new way to enhance your photos!

We call it Background Style.  Inspired by some amazing photos found on Etsy and other popular online stores, we wanted to make having clean backgrounds with natural soft gradients easy.  Starting now, your backgrounds can be white, grey, flat, a natural soft gradient, or anywhere in between!

By default, Background Style is set to the usual flat white/black background.  You can change the style by moving the solid blue circle anywhere.

Let's take a look at what happens when you move the circle around:

As you can see, when the blue disc is set toward the top, your background becomes lighter and whiter.  If you place the disc toward the bottom, the background becomes grayer.  Likewise, towards the right side the background becomes a flat solid color.  The left side has a nice smooth background made from the natural shading found in the original photo.

This versatile background option gives you an great amount of control to pick a background that best complements your item and let your photos stand out from the crowd!

And thank you, Chris Scott, for letting us use your photos from your amazing shop EuropeanRetro!

Put your Etsy shop on Sale with FotoFuze!

It's the holiday season again and many of our Etsy users are revving their engines for Cyber Monday and Christmas!

We're currently beefing up and making our Etsy Sales tool the best it can be for this holiday season so that you, and your customers, can get the most out of it.  Here's all you gotta do!


Under power tools, click the "Living Etsy Sales" button.  You'll find this on the left side of your homepage.


Click on "Create a Sale".  A window will expand, letting you set up all the details of your sale.


After you've entered all of the sale's details, click the "Finish" button.


We'll quickly check for any problems with starting the sale.  If we find a problem, we let you quickly fix the issue.


After you fix the issues or if there wasn't any problems at all, just click the finish button!


And your sale is ready to go!



FotoFuze gets Enhanced for the Holidays

Things at FotoFuze have been getting better and better.  

 

Fuze Faster

FotoFuze has never been faster!  Fuzing can finish in as few as 20 seconds. It's now so fast that before you're done highlighting another photo, the previous photo is almost always finished!

 

Fuzing Magic with the Magic Highlighter

If you are using the latest version of your browser, you should have access to the magic highlighter when highlighting your photos.

Not content with the status quo of the typical image editing tools, FotoFuze steps it up a notch. You can, with the new magic highlighter, highlight photos with a few simple strokes and the magic highlighter will highlight the rest for you - including the shadows.

 

Pro tip:  This tool works best when you highlight the outsides of the object first.

 

Upload All Your Photos at the Same Time

Ever since we started using uservoice.com's feedback widget (which you can find on the right side of most pages on FotoFuze) people expressed much interest in batch uploading.  You asked and we delivered!  You can now upload multiple images at the same time.  If your FotoFuze account is linked with your Etsy account, you will find the batch upload option located in the advanced menu of a listing.

Windows users can select multiple files by holding the Shift key and selecting a range of files or by holding the Ctrl key and selecting multiple individual files.

Mac users can select multiple files by holding the Shift key and selecting a range of files or by holding the Command key and selecting multiple individual files.

 

Softer Shadows When You Need Them

If you have a photo where shadows don't have nice sharp edges, then you'll likely find this very useful!  You'll find this feature as the shadow softness slider found on the right side of the page while highlighting a photo.  The slider goes between 1 and 5, where 1 is sharper shadows and 5 is softer shadows.

 


sharp

soft


Photo courtesy of rosamund_bird

Tuesday Updates

Hi Fuzers!

First the news. We've hit 500,000 fuzed photos, and we have well over 17,000 fuzers! Just incredible! 

Second, we've been quite busy tinkering over here and I'd like to mention some new features that went live both today, and over the last month or so.

The first new feature of the day is signatures. Signatures are a common bit of information that is appended to each of your listing descriptions every time you publish through fotofuze. Its a super simple way to let your customers know more about you, your shop, and your own business right from the listing description. We recommend putting links to your own off-etsy website, links to your other etsy shops, and a copyright notice. You can find signatures right below the description field when publishing a listing.

Another new feature that went out recently is that we now have a warning icon on the top right of fuzed photos now to let you know that this recently fuzed photo is not on etsy and the listing needs to be published. This alieviates the headache when trying to remember which ones you publshed on etsy, and which ones you missed! :) 

The third and final feature that we are announcing is the beta feature of living etsy sales. This feature is still in beta, but allows you to schedule sales to start and stop on specific dates on a specific section of your shop, and even allows you to change those details live at any time. This means that you can start a sale at 30% off and then mid-sale change your mind and decide that you actually want 35% off to help drive some more sales to your shop. You simply change the number and FotoFuze will automatically make all the necessary adjustments for you! Check it out the next time you want to put your shop on sale and give us some feedback! 

We have some more exciting stuff going on at FotoFuze that we are working on and will update again soon!

Best wishes,

- The FotoFuze Team

The 3 Most Common Problems FotoFuze Users Have (and how to fix them!)

Here at FotoFuze, we are excited to begin our relationship with Etsy--while individual Etsy sellers have used us regularly in the past, our service is now a member of Etsy's application gallery. To all our new (and old!) users, we've got some tips on troubleshooting the most common problems users have when using FotoFuze.

1.) Incorrect background 
This is the biggie--if the background isn't WHITE or BLACK, then the software FotoFuze uses is generally unable to fuze the photo properly. For optimum results, please use a flat white or black background--it's as simple as taking a picture on a sheet, piece of paper, tablecloth, etc.

Bad background: 

Poor background: 

Good background! 

2.) Highlighting Borders
The highlighting tool can be a little confusing for the first time user. Think back to when you highlighted in your schoolbooks--we want you to highlight the whole object, not just the borders.

Bad:

Poor:
This is close, but still not quite right. You'll get results, but they won't be optimal. (We'll get to why in #3.)

Good! 
The highlighted object should look like this once it's highlighted. This is what we recommend for best results. 

3.) Sharp Shadows
Our service does have a quirk in that when there's a sharp shadow, you must include it as part of the object. If your pictures have been coming out faded or overexposed, try evaluating how you highlight--is there a shadow you could include? Did you fill in the entire object? 

If you don't include a sharp shadow, as in our "Poor" example above, then your image probably will result in something like this.

For an optimum result, include the shadow, as shown in our "Good" example. You'll probably get a good result, like this. 

If you're still having problems or have any other questions, help is just an e-mail away--you can always reach us at support@fotofuze.com
We also recently instituted a live chat, and FotoFuze representatives are usually available as a real-time resource there as well. 
If you'd like to see a step-by-step guide of how to best use FotoFuze, check out our video tutorial, located .
In the next couple of days, we'll also have a picture based tutorial and a new FAQ coming to the website. Stay tuned!
Any other questions? Concerns? Let us know! 

-the FotoFuze team