Monday, September 12, 2011

Free Editing Software: Picasa

If you didn't already know, I sell on ebay. It is a great second income and allows me to have an ever revolving wardrobe.

One of the parts I love best about selling on ebay is taking photographs. Most people would think it would be the shopping. Shopping is fun but it is time consuming. Washing and ironing the clothing is the least fun. I love taking photographs though. I have several dress forms that I purchased at Wal-Mart a few years ago and a hanging mannequin that is only a torso that I purchased on ebay for about $10.

I use two programs for editing my ebay photographs and for all my photographs. The first is Picasa, which is a free download. Once you download Picasa, it looks for photographs on your computer's hard drive. It will put all of your photographs in one place for you. I loved this when I first did this since I found photos I thought I had deleted.

Once you have your photographs in Picasa, you can changing the lighting, put them in sepia or black/white and do a number of things to fine tune them.

Here are a few photos I took this morning while walking on the beach.

The first photo I used "sepia" on.

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The next photo I sharpened. Do you see the water coming off of the wave?

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The next is of the vacation condo. I took this when the sun had just come up and I used a tool called "warmify" to get the sand to look warm.

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This one I intensified the color of the sky by using "saturation".

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I don't use this tool very often. It is known as "film grain".

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There are quite a few more fun features but the one that tops them all in my book is "featured black & white". This was a couple strolling on the beach. If I see this couple tomorrow, I may ask them for their email and see if they want it.

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The second program is Adobe Elements 2.0 and I purchased it on ebay for about $10 years ago. I will save this program for a different post but let me say that I can airbrush out lines and wrinkles with this one!

____________Update:____________________
My husband and I are enjoying our beach vacation. I have been out of the hospital for 6 days now and for the last five of those my stomach has not been good. I am really hoping it settles down so we can enjoy our vacation. It is a great thing that the bathroom is not far from the beach!

Today we went east to Pensacola Beach. The water was warmer but there we jelly fish floating along in every direction. They were pink and about 18" across. A quick google search said they were "Moon Jellyfish" and here is a bit about them (in case you were wondering). "Surfers fear these the most---30 minutes or so of burning and itching await the unlucky swimmer who runs into a moon jellyfish. They are usually clear or white-tinted, with a pinkish cloverleaf pattern in the center, 3 to 20 inches across."


Fun to look at but not great to swim with. Let's just say that they didn't look like this:



The lifeguard said they would not sting if you stayed away from them (really lifeguard... this is the best advice you can give me?!?) but we didn't stay long. Tomorrow we will go back to hanging out at the beach just steps from the condo.

2 comments:

  1. I have only been to Pensacola one and the jelly fish were terrible. I hope you are feeling better soon.

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  2. Thanks for the comment Denise. Walking along the beach this morning there were a few jelly fish washed ashore. But thankfully we didn't see a single one in the water this afternoon. :)

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Thanks for commenting!