My Photo Editing Secret - And It's Free!

I love taking pictures of my little boy. I love taking pictures of my family. These are moments to treasure and the great thing about photos is they'll be around forever {or at least as long as you're around!}, so it's very important to me that I get quality photos of my family at each of our different life stages. My little boy will only be little once!

Here are some pictures I took of my little one just over a month ago.

Being a TOTALLY amateur photographer myself, I was pretty impressed with the way my little fall photo shoot came out. However, I have a dirty little secret. It's ALL editing. As I'm sure every professional photographer will tell you, editing is the key to a successful and B-E-A-utiful picture. I'm sure many of you could capture wonderful images through your wonderful cameras alone, but unfortunately I don't have a fancy schmancy camera or a fancy photoshop program. I simply used my three year old little dinky point and shoot for these. Yep, that little crappy thing made these awesome images!

Don't believe me? Here are some of the raw originals. Eeek!

Not too bad, but the edited ones *pop* so much more!

Luckily, it's your lucky day! LOL I'm going to share my suppppeeeer inexpensive editing secret with you. It's called Picnik and I think I'm in love with it. Picnik.com is a free photo editing software online, however many of it's features are not available if you do not pay the yearly fee to access all of it's content. So me, being the frugal one that I am, broke down and paid the $24.95 a year to join. But let me tell you it's been one of the best investments I've ever made!

It doubles as an awesome graphic design aid. I was even able to make my son's first birthday party invitations and decorations with it.

here's a sample of his invitations (he LOVES Super Why!)

and water bottle labels

and cupcake toppers

They ended up looking like this:

I mean you can make soooo much stuff  very easily with Picnik!

So now that I've shared my editing secret with you, hopefully now you can go out and make some great stuff of your own with it. Later, I'll show you how I actually edit each photo and my favorite actions in Picnik.  Happy editing!