Thursday, July 1, 2010

Easy Photo Editing

Are you like me? Do you feel challenged by using Photoshop to tweak your pictures?

I usually end up frustrated and give up half way through. I know there's a learning curve to that program, but who has the time?

Recently, I've been resorting more often to Picnik, a free photo editing program you can do straight from your browser. There's no need to download anything and it's super easy and fun to use. You can resize, crop, brighten colors, adjust exposure, add different frames, add text, make collages, and so much more.

Today I was playing around on it with a picture I took of a sculpture in Balboa Park in San Diego.

Here's the original...
Here's the photo cropped and more saturated...
Here's the photo with holga effect...
Finally, in honor of America's Independence coming up soon, here's red, white, and blue...
Picnik is loads of fun to play around with, and it's perfect for amateurs (like me).

What other photo editing programs do you use? Has anyone used Picasa? I heard that was also good.

5 comments:

Ashley said...

I use picnik sometimes, but I do wish I could download it to my computer lol. Also two years ago we we stood in front of that same statue around Christmas and I used picnik to put Santa hats on us and sent the picture with Christmas cards lol. :)

Heather @CritterChronicles said...

I use Picasa; because I'm a Google junkie all around (email, calendar, webs albums, Blogger) and Picasa is a Google product, it's easy for me to upload directly to either my web albums (which I use as my photo backup in case my computer crashes) or right to Blogger. I generally just barely tweak my pictures by cropping and pushing a one-fix button and maybe adjusting the lightness of the picture, but you can do a few other basic fixes too. I think it's really very similar to Picnik, which I tried briefly when I was flirting with using Flickr over Picasa Web Albums.

I don't have the time or energy to learn Photoshop right now - I tried playing with a trial version and there's a huge learning curve - so this is good for me for now and could be easily used by anyone, even with limited photo editing experience.

shopgirl said...

Yes, I've heard of this too. And I agree with you. Photoshop is difficult to learn on your own. I used to use Picasa quite often a couple years ago. Very easy.

I like these effects. Very cool.

Eve said...

I have not played with Picnik yet, but I will now. Looks like a lot of fun. I use Picasa and love it. I love the straighten tool because I often take crooked pictures. Hope you're having a great time in San Diego!

Claire said...

I was always commenting on a friend's pictures and so I finally asked her one day how she got them to look so good. You guessed it....picnik!!

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