Holiday Greetings -Make your own greeting card.
by admin on Dec.12, 2009, under Photo Applications, Photo Editing, Title Photos, crop photos, photo color
Merry Christmas Greeting
Earlier this week we woke up to 7 inches of new snow in Burnsville, MN. This was our first real snow this winter and while it created a miserable commute for many it certainly help put us in the holiday mood. And, of course, I couldn’t resist taking a few photos of our house which I recently decorated for the season and creating a greeting card. I wrote about creating greeting cards a couple of weeks ago so I won’t go into detail in this post. Of course I used CorrectPhoto and ImageTitler to quickly edit the photo and add the text. Here is another card using a different shot of the house.
Christmas card greeting created with CorrectPhoto and ImageTitler
As I have said many times, virtually all digital photos need to be cropped, color corrected and this is particularly true of photos you might want to use for a greeting card. The above greeting card examples are no exception. Both need to be cropped and color corrected and here is the before and after of the above house photo. Note how dull and lifeless the original photo is. I took the photos on a cloudy morning and the color is typical of snow photos taken under those conditions. But, as you can see, they can be easily turned into a good looking photo with a photo editor like CorrectPhoto or Photoshop Elements.
House photo was cropped and color corrected with CorrectPhoto
The greeting text was added with ImageTitler.
Add greeting text to photo with ImageTitler
Why not use one of your photos to create a unique greeting card to send to your friends this holiday season. It is easy and fun to do and anyone can do it.
I hope you have a wonderful holiday season.
Wayne www.correctphoto.com
A Simple Way to Organize Your Photos
by admin on Dec.07, 2009, under Digital Camera Basics
How many different events photos are in your camera?
This post is for my friend, Bill, and the many other amateur photographers who take pictures of various events but don’t download (or upload, if you prefer) them to their computer until the camera memory chip is about full. During lunch the other day Bill was telling me (actually he was quite proud of himself) that he had downloaded 175 photos from his camera and edited (cropped and color corrected) them with CorrectPhoto which he had just installed on his new Windows 7 computer. It turns out the photos had been taken throughout the summer and early fall and during trips to the cabin, Napa Valley, and the Thanksgiving trip to see the grandkids in Texas. He had uploaded all the photos to a single folder and then proceeded to edit the good photos and delete the bad and ended up with about 125 good photos. However, they were from about six different events and he didn’t know how to group them into categories. “How do I do that?” he asked. While this may sound like a dumb question my guess is that there are many people with digital cameras that have the same question. In fact, when I mentioned this to another friend, Dick M, he admitted that he had a camera full of photos taken over the last six months and had the same questions.
Download and Organize Your Photos Before Editing
A number of months ago I wrote a post on transferring photos from your camera to computer so I won’t go into details of the procedure again. Here is the process I used to organize the photos I took in November 2009. Note that I am now using Windows 7 so the screen shots might look a little different if you are using Windows XP or Vista, but the basics are the same.
1. Download photos to November 2009 file folder in My Pictures folder.
Download photos to new folder in My Pictures folder
First, I created a New Folder (November 2009) within the My Pictures folder and downloaded all of the photos on the memory card to this folder. You could create multiple folders if you know what is on the memory card. But, if you are like me you probably don’t remember all the photos you took since the last time you transferred photos from your camera to computer.
2. Create New Sub-Folders to Categorize the Photos
After looking at the photos decide how many sub-folders you need to organize them. In my example, I decided to create four folders: Rotary, Garden, Elmore Cabin, and Bill’s Tools.
Create New Subfolders-Right click/New/Folder
To create the new sub-folders simply Right Click the mouse and then click on New-Folder and then name the folder. In this example I decided to keep all of the folders within the November 2009 folder, however, you could create separate folders under the My Pictures folder if you prefer. (continue reading…)
Add Titles to Your Photos-New ImageTitler Software
by admin on Nov.29, 2009, under Helpful Stuff, Photo Editing, Title Photos, Windows 7
ImageTitler™ 3.2 by PictoColor
In my previous post, “Create Your Holiday Photo Greeting Card in Minutes“, I mentioned a program called ImageTitler. PictoColor just released ImageTitler 3.2, an updated version of this simple way to add titles and text to photos. The new version has more fonts and colors to choose from and increases the sizing flexibility.
ImageTitler is really a very simple program to learn and, frankly, gives the impression that it is a “tinker toy” application. The quality and sharpness of the the text on a photo is really excellent and the speed with which you can title a photo is impressive. Yes, if you have and know how to use Photoshop or Elements you can do much more with text than you can with ImageTitler. However, most of us either do not know how to use Elements or find that it is too time consuming. Therefore, ImageTitler is the answer to simply add text to a photo. I took this photo of my granddaughter on Thanksgiving, cropped and color corrected it with CorrectPhoto and added the simple title with ImageTitler and was finished in a few minutes.
Photo cropped and color corrected with CorrectPhoto and titled with ImageTitler
ImageTitler Process
The simple steps to add text to a photo is as follows:
- ImageTitler Steps: Type Text and Adjust Size and Position with Arrows
Create Your Holiday Photo Greeting Card in Minutes
by admin on Nov.19, 2009, under Photo Applications, Photo Editing, Title Photos, crop photos
Happy Holidays from Dickens
You can create your own holiday greeting cards in a few short minutes. Well, maybe we’ll start the timer after you decide on the photo you want to use. That might take a bit longer. For this example I chose a photo I took of Dickens last Christmas wearing his Santa outfit. (He really wasn’t crazy about wearing it, but was a good sport about it.)
Create your own greeting card-Dicken's had some help creating his
Step 1-Edit the photo
As I have said many times, every photo needs to be cropped and color corrected and this shot is no exception. I used CorrectPhoto to crop the photo using the 4×6 cropping format. I chose not to center Dickens so I could add the greeting on the right side of the photo. Using the OneClick color correction feature I clicked on the white portion of his hat and I was done.
Crop and color correct the photo-I used CorrectPhoto Editor
Step 2-Add Greeting Text to Photo
To add the text I used PictoColor’s ImageTitler because it is so simple (I still have difficulty using Photoshop Elements to add text to photos and it takes too long.)
Add Titles and Text to Photos with ImageTitler by PictoColor
Where is Elmore?—Taking Historical Photos!
by admin on Nov.10, 2009, under Photo Applications, Photo Editing
I am writing this post in Elmore, SD watching Spearfish Creek rush over a small dam in front of my friend’s cabin. Elmore is an early 1900’s ghost town in Spearfish Canyon in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It was the spot from which the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy logging railroad began its narrow-gauge climb up the east side of Spearfish Canyon along Annie Creek.
Elmore, SD is a ghost town that is now a community of summer homes in Spearfish Canyon
Today, Elmore is a group of summer and year round homes and is where our friends have a “cabin”.
Bill and Mary Kay's Cabin was built on the foundation of the old family cabin
The Old Cabin that was but is no more.
My wife and I have been coming to Spearfish Canyon with Bill and Mary Kay for many years and we often hiked by an old log cabin built in the early 1900’s. After thinking I should take a picture of it I finally did this past February. It was a good thing I did because it is now gone.
Elmore Log Cabin built in the early 1900s was one of the original homes in Elmore, SD
