Photography: Picmonkey

On the 1st of January fired with enthusiasm for the newly arrived year and chirping to myself ‘yes I can’, like a mad mynah bird influenced by the Obama 2008 campaign, I blithely listed on the blog a number of things I planned to do in 2012. It was a short list with nothing too taxing on it and as the year stretched ahead there would be plenty of time to tick off each item.

Right? Well er, wrong actually. One of the items on my list was to learn how to use Photoshop. I downloaded Photoshop Elements 10 Editor and opened it up. So far so very simple – well ok maybe not so simple. What I had failed to take into account was that when it comes to matters technological I am like Winnie the Pooh ‘of little brain’. I stared blankly at the screen and then played around with the app without much success. No matter, there were classes for the technologically challenged so I promptly enrolled in a short photography cum Photoshop course.

The course was good but I soon realized that, for now, what I most wanted to do with Photoshop was to make collages for the blog and this wasn’t covered in class. I did play around with Photoshop at home but couldn’t discover how to cobble together exactly the type of collage I wanted; I am sure it’s possible, I just haven’t discovered how it’s done. Nor did Collage Maker an app I had previously downloaded provided exactly the choices I was looking for.

So, I was inordinately pleased to discover Picmonkey an online photo editor where you can upload and edit photos. As well as having the usual editing tools Picmonkey also allows you to add: effects, frames, overlays, text, textures and to draw on the images you upload. Plus Picmonkey has a collage making facility which is perfect for me as it has exactly the sort of collage templates I want. Best of all it’s free and incredibly easy to use. If you want to check it out to see what it offers it’s at: http://picmonkey.com

I still intend to master Photoshop but methinks that means enrolling in another class come the Autumn.