Since I got Lizzie a easel for Christmas, she has no excuse but to paint. She was working on a painting that she has been working on for a few months, when she decided she was going to paint over it and start it over again. I remember one painting she actually painted over four times before she settled on a finished product.

Since she was going to paint over it, I asked her if I could work on it. She said sure. So I did a little outlining in black, then made a black and white of my jowling picture, cropped and cut it out and pasted the picture onto the fat lady. After seeing the additions I made to her painting, Lizzie decided she would keep the picture(for now).

To create a Jowling picture of your own, see the original Jowling post on Digital Point Photography.

After reading Techcrunches report about Picnik being live on Flickr , I went to the Flickr blog and read about the newest Flickr feature that enables online photo editing using Picnik’s Photo editing services.

To use the service while using Flickr, you must be signed it to your Flickr account, and then when viewing your photos, click the edit button at the top of one of your photos. You are then taken to Picnik where you see all the editing options that are available to you from a Picnik’s free account.

Its a pretty simple interface that includes such options as cropping, red eye reduction, color adjustments and more. There are plenty of advanced features available as well, but many more features can be obtained by upgrading your free account for a little less than 25 bucks a year. For someone who does not want to make the purchase of Photoshop, this might be an awesome tool to use for editing of photos. I will probably continue to use Photoshop, but I can also see myself using Picnik while using Flickr.

Also, while surfing the net, there is a Firefox addon, that lets you edit graphics online through the use of your right click menu. There is also an extension for IE if that is your browser of choice. Here is the Picnik tools page for a list of available photo editing tools .

In addition to Flickr, Picnik can also be used with Facebook, PhotoBucket, Picasa, and Webshots, and it’s API is available for others to use and develop for other applications.

What do You Think?

This is the first Internet based Photo Editing site that I have used or reviewed for that matter. While doing the review I was exposed to several other sites. Does anyone have any experience with any other photo editing sites? What do you think about PicniK?

Tags: photo editing, online photo editing, Flickr, Picnik, photography

Here is a basic easy tip for cropping with Photoshop. Many times in the past all I would do to crop out a piece of a picture would be to click on the crop tool, click on the picture and drag the cursor so that the crop box would include everything or nearly everything I wanted cropped. Often times though this is not very accurate.

An Easy Cropping Solution.

Lizzie showed me how to use the guidelines sometime ago, and since I discovered them, I have used them almost every time I want to crop.

In order to use guidelines you need to have the rulers on. Go to the view tab and click “Rulers” or just use the shortcut “CTR R” which will enable the rulers.

Grab The Guidelines

Next put your cursor in the ruler at the top or side, click and drag the ruler over to the edge of part of the picture you want to crop. Do it again to create the other side of the crop box. Then grab the opposite ruler and do the other two sides. Now that you have the area defined, click either the rectangular marquee or the elliptical marquee tool. Click at the top of your area marked off by the guidelines and drag down until the entire area for the rectangular marquee is selected or until the elliptical crop selection fills the box. The crop tool will use the guidelines, so your cropping selection will be much more accurate.

Release the cursor then CTRL X or CTRL C > CTRL N >CTRL V. Then go to the Layer tab at the top of the screen, select “flatten image”. Then you can save the cropped pic as a new pic and you are ready to use your cropped picture.

What Tips Do You Have?

I hope this little tip is something you can use. If you have some other Photoshop tips for me, please leave a comment as I am eager to learn new Photoshop tips. This can include links to Photoshop tutorials you may have done.

The top commentator for mid November was the Photographer Forrest Croce. For some really awesome Photography tips and lessons, you should check out Forrest’s Fine Art Photography site.

Forrest also has a blog were he offers up some Photography tips. In his post, Vivid Color in Photoshop, Forrest relates some of the methods he uses to create vivid life like colors using both common sense and Photoshop.

Two of the common sense methods or maybe not so common sense methods for outdoor photography he suggests are:

1. Shoot outdoor photos in the hour before the sun is going down or in the “Golden Hour”.
2. Shoot just after it has rained.

Photoshop tips

Several Photoshop tools that he suggest using in the post are;

1. Using the Channel Mixer to fine tune the color saturation.
2. Using the Color Balance tool to create more natural colorization options.

In addition to telling how he adjusts photos manually, Forrest also offers some down loadable tools to automate the procedures that he discusses.

Below are before and after pictures of a Lake Pontchartrain Sunset I took on our New Orleans trip that I edited with Photoshop using Forrest’s techniques.

Before Editing

After Editing

Be sure to check out Forrest’s site for some tremendous photography resources as well as his photo galleries.

Last week I posted several tips in my Flickr and Photoshop Tip post, which was also my first Graphics/photo Thursday post. I had quite a few good tips from readers in response to the post.

The best being the tip from Dennis of Santorini Views, a blog about the Greek Island of Santorini. Not a good blog for Lizzie and I to be looking at, since we both are itching to travel. Thanks to Dennis’s new Santorini blog, we have added the little Greek island to our travel wish list.

Anyway the Photoshop tip that Dennis left in his comment was seriously much easier to use than the one that I posted. So here it is in step by step.

Using the Measure tool to align to Horizontally or Vertically.

1. select picture by going to file, select open and navigate to the file you have your pictures stored.
2. Right click on the eye dropper in the Photoshop palette toolbar.
3. Choose the Measure Tool, which should be the last option.
4. Left Click and hold on one corner of the object you would like to align horizontally or vertically.
5. Still holding the left button down, drag the cursor to the other corner of the edge of the object. You should see a line on the objects edge.
6. Release the left mouse button.
7. Go to Image at the top of the Photoshop screen. Go down to Rotate Canvas and then choose Arbitrary in the drop down menu.
8. A little box will appear, which will rotate the picture a number of degrees clockwise or counter clockwise. The appropriate box should be automatically chosen. click OK. The Photo should now be rotated so that the object is now aligned horizontally or vertically.
9. I then crop out the desired section of the photo, but photo cropping is another photoshop tip.

Let me know if this tip has been helpful, or let me know of any tips that you use which I could add to my Photoshop tool belt. Thanks again to Dennis of Santoriniviews.com for this Photoshop tip.