Picnik

I've been having so much fun playing with textures on Picnik. It's the next best thing to actually painting a picture. I wish I could paint, but I digress.

I found Picnik through Flickr which is the site I use to upload photos to my blog. Picnik is an online photo editing service. Some of the editing features are free on Flickr, but you can upgrade to the Premium Package for $24.95 a year. (I'm not trying to sell it. I just thought this might be useful information.) This package offers all kinds of editing tools and is user friendly. I mean seriously, If I can use it anyone can.

One of my favorite tools to use is the texture tool. For example, here is a photo of the shed in our back yard in Maine.


Not that exciting. Right? After playing with the exposure and adding some texture this is what I came up with.


There are lots of textures to choose from like peeling paint, canvas, and water droplets to name a few.

Here are more before and after photos:

A pond we used to live near. I loved how the water was so still that the trees were reflecting in it.



I first over exposed the photo and then added the canvas texture. You can really see the canvas texture in this one.

This was a boat that was sailing in Blue Hill Bay called the Schooner Heritage. It looked so beautiful in all it's glory.


The photo doesn't do it justice. After some cropping and texturizing it became this:



Which became this:



I still have a lot to learn, but it's been fun and that is all that counts. I really want to invest in Photoshop some day which has a more difficult learning curve, but you can really do some amazing editing. Ahhh... someday.