How to Edit Photos For Free

I am start­ing to fig­ure out to edit pho­tos for this blog and just because I’d like to have more pol­ished pho­tos of our fam­ily mem­o­ries.  I don’t have the abil­ity to buy a pro­gram to edit pho­tos right now.  I would love to get Adobe Pho­to­shop and learn it in more detail. I have putzed around with Pho­to­Shop in the past but never gone in depth with it. But as of now I’m learn­ing on a free pro­gram until I fin­ish sav­ing for PhotoShop.

We also don’t have a fancy cam­era.  It would be AWESOME to get one like one of the many Nikon dig­i­tal SLR cam­eras that I’ve been drool­ing over (seri­ously DROOLING–Costco is going to ban me from the cam­era sec­tion).  BUT cur­rently we have a basic dig­i­tal cam­era, I believe the pic­ture I’ve been edit­ing is with the cur­rent Canon Pow­er­Shot A530 we use. No fancy addi­tional gad­gets with it.

Any­way after play­ing around a bit I highly rec­om­mend giv­ing Paint.Net a try if you are look­ing for a way to edit pho­tos.  It is designed for Win­dows 7, Win­dows XP, or Win­dows Vista (SP2 or newer) or a Win­dows server (2003 SP1 or newer).  And while it is lim­ited in com­par­i­son to Adobe’s Pho­to­Shop, it’s still a pretty good pro­gram for free.

I decided to post it because I thought that it could be good for some of you who are look­ing for a fru­gal way to learn photo editing.

Reminder that I’ve ONLY been play­ing with it a LITTLE AND I ONLY have a basic dig­i­tal cam­era.  I AM NOT A PRO.  In fact, I am sure oth­ers when look­ing at these ini­tial attempts will think I could have done a lit­tle a lot bet­ter.  I don’t dis­agree because I AM STILL LEARNING!

Here is an orig­i­nal photo from when we took a fam­ily vaca­tion 2 years ago.  We went up to the north of our state.  It is beau­ti­ful there.  We took a few pic­tures that were scenic.  I decided to play around with a photo that I loved because it has a beau­ti­ful scenery and sim­ple farm in the shot. You all know how I love the sim­ple life fan­tasy, even though I’m a city girl.

Then I played around a lit­tle with con­trast, sharp­en­ing, and bright­en­ing the photo. I did crop it and straight­ened it.  I wanted to try to make the pic­ture pop. The shot then looked like this:

After that I took the photo and played with the sepia func­tion.  I wanted a feel of a news­pa­per photo, from the turn of the cen­tury, that had aged.  Cap­tur­ing how the world has changed. That adjust­ment turned out like this:

I’m only begin­ning to fig­ure out how to use the pro­gram and I’m really impressed with what it can do for free. And so I wanted to pass on the infor­ma­tion to any­one out there who is inter­ested in edit­ing pho­tos but may be cash strapped. I plan to adjust some of the fam­ily pho­tos we have too. I’m look­ing for­ward to hon­ing my cre­ative skills.

Tagged as: editing photos, frugal, paint.net, photos, photoshop