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Mr. G Edits A Photo

by beth on September 24, 2009

in Uncategorized

barn in city

All the kids love pho­tos, even the baby loves hav­ing his pic­ture taken. The older kids love tak­ing pho­tos, view­ing them on the com­puter, & a now are excited to see how you can crop them or do lit­tle changes. Mr. G helped edit this photo with paint.net. I did all the heavy lift­ing but he gave his opin­ion on how it should look. We just cropped, added a slight glow, & then soft­ened the photo some. He got final say on what he liked with the picture.

I think this is a great way to get kids involved in see­ing the beauty in the world around them. They can can also have a mem­ory of help­ing take a pic­ture or find a great shot. For exam­ple, Mr. G & Mamacita decided that this was a good shot to take. It was a lot of fun going around with them tak­ing pictures.

They got to show me what they saw that was beau­ti­ful or inter­est­ing around them. I got to see the world through their eyes. They notice things that I often take for granted around me. How­ever, I did nix the idea of tak­ing pic­ture of what looked like a squir­rel that had been hit by a car. While it was inter­est­ing it was also totally gross. I can­not imag­ine what edit­ing that would have been like, EWW!! They also had a good laugh at my grossed out face after they pointed it out to me.

But still the over­all expe­ri­ence got me to think­ing that my band of rabble-rousers are going to be quite the shut­ter­bugs. I just hope they don’t decide to make road­kill the main focus of their artis­tic exploration.

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How to Edit Photos For Free

by beth on September 18, 2009

in work & school

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.

north

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:

north 1 (3)

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:

north 3 (3)

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.

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