Fun Photo Editing

A couple of weeks ago, I shared a few sneak peak photos from our fall family photo session. Well, we received our disk of pictures and I knew immediately I wanted to edit a couple. There were great shots of the kids and I wanted to zoom in on just them. It was a great opportunity to try a photo editing project I "pinned" from the The Weekend Homemaker!

Before I starting blogging, I was unaware of the great free photo editing tools available to me so I wanted to share how easy this is!

This is the photo I started with.

For this photo, I used Picasa, a free photo editing software from Google. It's easy to download to your computer. You click the download button on www.picasa.google.com and it's done.

First, I'd suggest making a copy of the photo you want to edit so you will have the original. Then, I selected the photo I wanted to edit and used the 'Crop Photo' icon in the 'Basic Fixes' tab.

Using Basic Fixes tab again, select 'Text' and select the text you want to use. Type the message and click 'Apply. I played around with the different fonts and settled on Mongolian Baiti. I inserted a different text box for each line so I could move it around. To add additional text you can either repeat the previous steps or use the 'copy caption' button.

Another trick I learned for large pictures, is you can reduce the size of the file by using the export feature. This is helpful if have a large megabyte file that you want to display on a blog or email. I usually re-size the photo to 480 pixels so that the photo loads quickly on the blog and it's easy to email, but the photo below I used 620 to have a larger photo.

Final result….

I tried another photo using Picnik.com, another site where you can upload, edit and share your photos. {UPDATE: Picnik closed April 19, 2012. You can still access some Picnik functionality, like the information shared below, through Picasa but you will not be able to access it directly and it will look a little different than the screen shots provided below.} This is great because no registration is required so anyone can use this! While I prefer Picasa, Picnik has several unique font options. I should mention Picasa now offers the convenience to 'edit in Picnick' from their 'basic fixes' tab.

Edited Photo

The original photo looked like this.

I followed the same steps to crop the photo and then add text using jules-te-reo font. I used Jacob's photo edit to demonstrate how to add text in Picnik.

When you first upload the photo, you will want to do any basic edits such as crop or correct exposure. Below are the instructions to add text.

1. Once you complete your basic edits, select text.
2. Scroll through and select the text you want to use. For Jacob's photo I used a font called Hockey is Lif (no 'e').
3. Enter the text in the box and click 'add'. A pop up box will appear that allows your to edit the text size and color.
4. Once you are finished adding and modifying the text then Save your picture.

End Result

I love the idea of doing these every year to track each child's interest and growth! I'm still working on getting mine to look as polished as my Pinterest inspiration below and then I'll be printing them for my soon to be wall gallery.

Please let me know if you have any questions!! I'm not an expert but I would love to help however I can!

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