Welcome to Fashion Mash™! Here are some quick things to get you started.

TAKING PICTURES

After you have set up your account, the fun begins by taking pictures of your own clothes. Some people like to hang their clothes up for the picture.

Sometimes it is easier to use a neutral background like a sheet or blanket on a floor or a bed, for spreading your clothing out flat upon.

You'll have to experiment to figure out what is easiest for you & your clothes. For long pants & dresses, I sometimes have trouble getting them into the picture frame if they are laid out flat. For these I either hang them on a hanger on the door, or I get on a chair & lean over them to take the picture.

Don't worry too much about lighting. We recommend that you turn on whatever lights you have available in the room & use your camera's flash. Pictures do get enhanced in our uploading process. It doesn't take long to snap off a few pictures.

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UPLOAD

Once your pictures are on your computer, you can upload each clothing item to our site by clicking on "Upload an item" on the top right hand side of the website.

Ordinarily a few enhancement filters are applied to the image during upload. For most clothing pictures, you will want to leave both boxes unchecked. If you don't like the results of the enhancement, you can check the box "disable enhancement filters" to disable them and upload again.

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EDIT

Now that the item is uploaded, you can rotate if needed. You can rotate it more than once if it is upside down to start with.

nezroy likes to use the red square crop tool (it says "rectangle select" if you hover your mouse over it) & just crop the item with its background. He likes the paperdoll look of it.

I like to use the tracing one next to that called "polygon select" and you can see my red line in the picture where I traced just inside the item's borders. You can be a bit faster & sloppier than trying to trace where it meets the background.

This gets rid of the background and as long as you follow the shape of the item generally, it still looks nice.

Once you have completed your crop or trace, click on apply. This will give you a preview of the item. You can then decide if you want to save it, or go back & edit it some more. When you save it, make sure you use lots of descriptive tags. This helps when you are searching through your items later.

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BACKDROPS & BLING

You can also use the upload item area to upload graphics to decorate your outfits. For those kinds of things, you may want to go ahead & check the boxes to disable the enhancement & skip the editing stage.

You can upload JPG, PNG, and GIF files up to 2MB in size. PNG transparency will be preserved.

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MAKING OUFITS

After you have uploaded a few items, you can start making outfits with your clothing by clicking on "Create an outfit" at the top right of the screen.

Selecting items for your outfit: You can click & drag items down to the outfit window from the filter results at the top.

Resizing: There will be boxes around your item in that window that you can now click & drag on to resize the clothing item.

Removing an item: You can remove an item you have dragged into your outfit by clicking on it & then hitting the X where the item shows up under "Item List" on the right hand side of the screen.

Tilting an item: Click on the item & then find it in the "Item List" on the right hand side of the screen. You can choose right or left under tilt. This change won't display until you hit the "Preview & Save" camera icon on the left hand of the screen.

Background Colour: This can be changed by clicking on the window in the bottom left of screen.

Preview & Save: Hit the "Preview & Save" camera icon on the left hand side of the screen to see what the final outfit image will look like. This will change the screen to a preview of your outfit. If you don't like the tilting or you need to edit some more, you can then click "Edit More". If you are ready to save it, then type in a name for the outfit & click on "Save New". You can always come back to the outfit by clicking on it in your profile & then clicking "Edit Outfit" right under the picture of the outfit.

Searching for items: When I'm looking for items to use in my outfit, I usually just use the forward & back buttons at the top left of the screen. However, you can click on "Edit Filter" to search for specific items you have uploaded & tagged, or to search for items that other people have uploaded & tagged. I like to use the "Edit Filter" especially when I am looking for some graphical flair. When I upload these items, I tag them as "backdrop" for graphics that cover the whole background of the outfit window or "bling" for small decorative elements.