picnik - free photo editing site

www.picnik.com is a great site! You can do lots of effects on your photos for free, or pay $25/year for more advanced capabilities.

They have neat stickers you can use to embellish. You can correct photo flaws like red-eye and brightness. Check it out. Have a blast!

And just look at these fonts!

With sumopaint for drawing, and picnik for photo-editing, and picaboo for making scrapbooks, you never need to buy any software!

SumoPaint

SumoPaint (www.sumopaint.com) is a neat free digital art editor. It is more for creating images from scratch than for photo editing. But it is very user friendly and has some neat tools.

I think it could be put to good use making embellishments, backgrounds and other digital scrapbooking elements.

Here is something that took me less than a minute to create.

No software to download. You just go to their site and use the tool.

I don't know how they make money. I don't even see any advertising on their site.

Create and enjoy!

Freebie: Nationals Title

I followed the tutorial for text along a hand drawn curve and created this title. You can use it for a page about your kid going to nationals for a sporting event! (In my family that would be roller-skating. Perhaps soon it will be running as well.)

Copyright notice: You can freely use this for personal use. For commercial or for-profit use, please contact me. Do not represent work as your own. To pass this along to someone else, please refer them to my blog.

My first freebie!

Hey here are some colorful hearts you can use for embellishing a page! This is a .png file with a transparent background. You should be able to use it with most photo editing programs.

Copyright notice: You may use this freely for personal use. Contact me for any commercial or for-profit use. Do not represent the work as your own.

First experience with Creative Memories StoryBook Creator 2

Well, I really liked the freebies Creative Memories has on their site. I thought I would try their software and write about how I like it.

It installed OK. There was an update that needed to be installed. That installed OK.

I launched it and tried to create a new project. I picked StoryBook 7X5 Softcover. That is their most inexpensive option at $17.95 for 20 pages. I think picaboo is cheaper. Their cheapest option is $9.99. Fine. Maybe they allow more pages, or use better paper. I haven't seen how the books come out yet, so it's hard to compare.

But the next thing that happened absolutely stumped me. Once you pick your project type, you have to pick a theme. I absolutely LOVE that at picaboo you don't have to pick a theme, you can just create each page from scratch. But the dumb thing was, for the 7x5 Softcover, there were no themes! So the "Next" button is greyed out. They only thing I can do is "Cancel".

Pretty dumb.

Not impressed.

Well I went to their website and downloaded a theme for their 7x5 book. There aren't many selections for a 7X5 book! I picked one I like. You can see what some of the pages look like here. And this did get me past my stuck point.

There are two things I don't like about having to pick a theme for a photobook:

1. I might want to do a simple chronological scrapbook. I might have Christmas pages, Halloween pages, gardening pages, vacation pages all in the same book. So I really want to make each page or pair of pages independently.
2. The colors in the theme may not go with the colors in my photos.

So far, I'm still sold on picaboo.

Digital Freebies from Creative Memories

I just found this. They have lots of neat embellishments for free that you can add to your pages! I'll add to my links section.

http://projectcenter.creativememories.com/digital/digital-freebies/page/3/

How to make backgrounds from your photos with Paint Shop Pro

When you are taking photos of people, flowers, etc., be sure to also take pictures of things that might normally miss your notice - things you think of as background. Why? To use as backgrounds of course - for your scrapbook pages.

At the beach? Take a picture of the sand or the seafoam. Wedding? Be sure to get photos of the cake, food, champagne glasses, even the tablecloths.

Here is a very simple way to turn these background photos into backgrounds for your layouts.

Pull up your photo in Paint Shop Pro. If desired, use the selection tool with rectangle or square selection type and select just the portion of the photo you wish to use. Type control C control V to get this selection into its own image.

On the Effects menu, select Image Effects, then Seamless Tiling. The default selections will probably be what you want. Try a few out to see what they do.

Then save this file in My PSP Files\Patterns. You have saved your background.

To use the background, select New from the File menu to create a new image. Select the height and width dimensions for an entire scrapbook or photobook page. Make sure Transparent is unchecked, and click in the color and texture selection area. Click on the Pattern tab. Click the pattern selector and you will see the pattern you created. Select it. You may change the angle or scale if you like. If you want to see your background print on a diagonal, type 45 into the angle number selector. If you would like to see bigger images and fewer repeats in your background, type a larger number than 100 in the scale number selector. Click OK.

Click OK again on the New Image window.

You should have created a new image with a background made from a smooth repeated pattern from your original photo!

How to make letters from pictures with Paint Shop Pro

This is using Paint Shop Pro 9. But I imagine the process is similar with other photo editing sofware programs.

1. Open a photo.
2. If necessary, use the perspective correction tool to get a flat view of the object(s) in the photo.
3. Use the text tool to place a letter on the photo. Arial Black is a good font to use for this.
4. Use the wizard selection tool to select the letter. Use RGB value as the match mode. Get just the letter selected.
5. Right-click on the background layer in the Layers menu and select Promote Selection to Layer.
6. With the Promoted Selection layer selected, type control C control V to cut and paste your photo letter.
7. Create a new image with a solid color.
8. From the Edit menu, select Paste/Paste/Paste as New Selection.
9. From the Selections menu, select Modify/Expand.
10. In the dialog box, enter the width of the border in pixels.
11. Type control C control V to cut the matted letter into its own image.
12. Save your letter.

First experience with picaboo

Excited about trying out picaboo to make a digital scrapbook. I downloaded their software. It took about 10 minutes. Very easy.

I noticed that part of their software seems to be a way to chat with other picaboo users. Haven't checked that out yet.

But what I really want to do is create a scrapbooky-looking digital page. You can do simple photobooks just like many other sites where you pick a theme, load your photos and voila you're done. But you can also create pages from scratch. This is what I'm about to try out.

Since I'm actually pretty caught up on my scrapbooking, I decided to just do a page about the gardening we've been doing. I have some garden pictures so I uploaded those. Easy-peasy.

After selecting the photos to upload and there are two options there. Create a book and create a card. Hmmm. I want to create just a page. Well I clicked on the create a book, and eventually got to a prompt that let me either create my book by "Auto Create" or "From Scratch". I picked "From Scratch".

Next you can pick the type of cover you want. The prices range from $9.99 to $349.99! Quite a selection.

I like the layout of their software. Very easy to navigate. You've got your photos at the bottom, a main page creation section, and options on the left for selecting backgrounds and other elements. I love the fonts! They have a Dracula font that is really cool.

None of the backgrounds that displayed went very well with the picture for my cover page, so I clicked on "More Backgrounds Online". Picaboo has a feature where any scrapbooker can upload a background and share it with other scrapbookers. This is one of the things that excited me most about this site more than the others. I want to look for some gardening-themed background, or maybe something with a lot of green in it.

I typed "gardening" into the background search. Nothing really grabbed me there. I typed "garden". Got tons of matches this time. The background search is a little slow. These backgrounds range from just photos people have taken to things they've spent their time creating with Photoshop or other software programs. 540 backgrounds show up by using the search word "garden". I picked a green background with curlicues. (I'm very fond of curlicues!)

Oops. Made my first booboo. Accidentally rated the background as 3 stars when I meant to rate it as 5. I don't see a way to correct this. I feel bad for the background designer! I like her background and I accidentally caused her rating to downgrade. Well now I know how it works.

It looks like if you are using Internet Explorer, you can just drag the background from the website to your page. But I use Mozilla. So I have to save the background to my machine, and then upload it into the Picaboo software using the "Get Pictures" button according to their instructions. Hmmm. I don't have a "Get Pictures" button. I have a "Get Photos" button. I'll see if that works. It does. the background shows up where my pictures do. I can just drag and drop it to the background area of my page.

Now it looks like the Picaboo software put a white matting on my photo. I'd love to change the color. I click on "Photo Tools" in the upper-left portion of the window. There are lots of great tools here: red eye removal, contrast and brightness adjustment, rotation, zoom, border style, black and white, sepia. There is a checkbox for "White Border". So I guess the choice is white border or no border. Bummer! What if you want a green border? I guess you have to matte your photos separately in your own photo editing software before you upload them if you want to do this.

OK my first page is done!

I would like to see some additional features for sure. Maybe in a later version. I would like to be able to create a title for a page with big multi-colored fonts, and I'd like to be able to journal in a shape other than a rectangle. It would definitely be nice to matte a photo in other than white. Cropping a photo in interesting shapes would be cool too. So if you want any of these features, I guess you do them in your own photo editing software, and create elements that you can upload.

In all, a great first experience. The software is easy to use, and the community of digital scrapbookers sharing their creations is a HUGE creative advantage over what I've seen from other photo sites.