FOUR ON LINE PHOTO EDITORS

Better late than never, right?  We will have a guest photographer giving some awesome tips next Tuesday, but for now it's just me lil' ol Miss B.  I really don't want to go through all the in's and outs of photography 101, because there's plenty of much better sites that can help you, one of them being the Pioneer Woman which is one of the very best I have come across (she's on my blogroll in case you lose the link).

Today I wanted to mention some on line photo editors, from the very, very basic to the more feature rich versions.  Some of theses are the grand 'ol price of FREE!!! Photo editors are programs such as Photoshop which if you are like me and need to use something like this for work it will run you almost one thousand bucks! My first car was less than my Adobe Creative Suite investment.  Lucky for you, if you are just a photo enthusiast and want to get some images ready to show to your pals, relatives, add to your blog or website then you can use these below programs to great results!

First up Photoshop Express. As far as I can tell this bad boy is FREE, I signed up and started editing. My favorite feature being the white balance tool which gives you several visual options with the photo your editing to choose what you like best.

Here's a screen shot of the white balance options on Photoshop Express that I adore (click on image to see a larger version):

Next up is FotoFlexer.  This is probably the most aesthetically disturbing to me. Sorry, I like to work in pretty environs and although this does have a ton of positives, FREE, no sign up, effortlessly save to your desk top and some very fun filters, it may not be pretty enough for me to spend any serious amount of time there.  You may feel differently so this is what I was able to do take the above photo and turn it into an old photo with one click of the 'old photo' effect.  Here's my photo and screen shot click the screen shot photo to enlarge):

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Picnik, at $25 it is more expensive than the previous mentions but a heck of a lot less than traditional photo editor software. Jules told me about this one after I asked her how she got rounded corners on her blog images. In my very expensive Photoshop version I don't have the luxury of one click photo corners so I thought she was a genius.  A lot of Flickr users swear by Picnik, I am not in love but I do heart quite a few of its features like the faux snow (it tickles me to no end). Here's a Picnik faux snow effect :

Here I layered a bunch of effects, I used the rounded corner frame, the cross processed and 1960's effect which I later found out gives you a rounded corner effect automatically but hey you live and learn (please note this is the same photo as in the very first screen shot, pretty cool, eh?:

I also found a company called Aviary that is way advanced (although you can still do the basics like crop and resize, etc), but you can also do vector artwork such as invites and other printed goods that I thought you might want to know about. It's put together very well and there's some great tutorials.

I hope this helps point you in the basic direction to editing your images and adding a little artistic flair. Just imagine how cute your holiday photo cards are going to look! You will blow your cousin Tina's photo cards right out of the water....