I’m Thankful: Picmonkey

Truly awesome bloggers are generally pretty darn good photographers too.

Many of them are moms who love capturing beautiful images of their homes and their families, so they buy DSLR cameras and learn how to use them.  They often have sophisticated photo editing programs like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom at their disposal too.

I’m not one of those bloggers.

Mostly because I haven’t saved up hundreds of dollars to buy a DSLR camera, and I’m honestly kind of intimidated to shell out all that cash for fear that I won’t be able to figure out how to use the darn thing to get the kind of pictures I love.

It doesn’t keep me from admiring the gorgeous photos of bloggers like Shawni, Ashley, Kelle, Annie, Melissa, Emily, Ashley, and so many more.

Fortunately, I’ve made peace for now with the whole idea of having ordinary pictures from my Canon point and shoot camera or my iPhone.

It’s cheap, easy and I just take a bunch of pictures until I get one that’s halfway decent.

But earlier this year I discovered Picmonkey.com and I’ve been hooked ever since.

It’s a FREE website that allows amateurs like me to beef up our ordinary photos and even play around with adding fun fonts, frames and filters to our ordinary point and shoot photos.  They also have a feature that allows you to combine multiple images into fun collages.

A few sites like this one and this one have written short tutorials for using Picmonkey, but I think it’s user-friendly enough to learn by playing around with it.

I have fun trying out different fonts to take my recipe post photos from this…

to this.

And to create fun collages like this…

And to just be silly by turning this….

into this :)

I’m not an expert on photo editing by ANY MEANS, but I’ve been having fun getting to know all of the features in Picmonkey and attempting to hone my skills to make my “average joe” photos even just a smidge better.

And Picmonkey isn’t just for bloggers.  It’s really for anyone who ever wanted to brighten up a picture, or crop out something odd in the background, or turn it black & white, or add a fun caption or make it look old fashioned or just edit out a chunk of food in an otherwise great smile.

Check it out, you’ll be glad you did :)

 

*Just for the record, the folks at Picmonkey have no idea who I am and didn’t ask me to pimp out their site.  I just love what it has to offer and wanted to share it with all of you :)