Tuesday 30 October 2007

I'm no expert

I'm not a great photographer, and I'm not a great photo editor, but sometimes my photo editing makes me look like a good photographer. I use two very user friendly FREE downloadable editing programs.

Picasa by Google was the first program I tried - RGLHM introduced me to it. It has a valuable "I'm feeling lucky" button that does wonders, but it also has many other tools to play with. I used the Picasa photo collage on my last SPT.

To break it down, I took the following three pictures, and combined them into a multi-exposure collage using Picasa :
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"Multi-Exposure"

No doubt the multi-exposure self portrait has lost a little of it's magic now that I've shared my trick! It's really that easy. If you want to play with your own pictures in Picasa, here is the Picasa free download.

Last year RGLHM introduced me to Shutterfly, and I made my first Shutterfly photo book. Then a few months ago another of my sisters-in-law, Natalie, asked me if I'd ever tried the Shutterfly Studio (free) software. Shutterfly has some fun features of its own such as graphic poster (see my profile picture) and oil painting. Shutterfly will even whiten your teeth!
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My only caution is that both of these programs want to be your default upload program for your computer. You have to check your settings if you want to continue to upload as you have in the past without interference from these programs. So blogger beware :-)
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9 comments:

Neighbor Jane Payne said...

Oh wow, Barb, you're good. Good to be able to do it, good to share! Thanks for keeping such a great blog.

Jill said...

I'm dying to make one of those photo books, but haven't decided what to do one for yet.

carlo said...

oh how kind of you to share. You really are the best.

Love the ideas and free? i love that too. i need to look into both. thanks a bunch.

Denise said...

I love Picasa. That's what I use for my photos. But I didn't know you could do that cool stuff...I must be looking in the wrong places! Or maybe there's a new version that I need to upgrade to. Anyway, very cool!

Unknown said...

we did a shutterfly book of our family trip to disney for my parent's 40th. we all have a copy (we all contributed photos to it) and it is the most amazing keepsake of that time!

thanks for sharing the picasa info.

Kelly said...

I really need to figure this stuff out since 4 years of photos might be lost in the Great Crash of '07. Thanks for the recommendations.

And you silly northerner. Winter, what's winter? Although we did get two snow days last year when it was in the 30's for two days (but no snow).

melanie said...

I love the hard bound books. My mom made one from mypublisher.com and I love it. I think I'll do one for her for Mother's Day. That way the baby will be here and be a little older.

I always love what you do with your photos. What fun programs to play with.

Price Cream Parlor said...

Fantastic! Thanks for sharing! I must look into these. I have heard about them over and over again - but I am in love with your butterfly photo design - I must give this a try!

jenny said...

I actually used to use Picasa but it gave me fits when I would upload. Cool new features!