Techie Tuesday: Improve Your Images with Three Free Resources

You don’t know what you have. 

This phrase is usually mentioned in regards to someone being ungrateful. However, from working with bloggers, I’ve discovered that most bloggers aren’t using all the tools they can, and opting to pay for tools they necessarily don’t need. Today, I wanted to share some of my favorite free resources for photo composition and editing.

One of the most common questions I get from bloggers is, “should I buy photoshop”? My answer is no in most cases. The only real exception would be if you have a photography blog.

Product Collages - Canva: Bloggers can spend a lot of time finding the perfect images and products for collages. Canva is great because you can include any images/products that you want. It also provides some built in templates and graphics that you can customize. Any graphics or illustrations that you want to arrange for your blog, social media profiles, or promotions, you can definitely do in Canva.

Photo Editing - iPhoto: You can only do so much with a photograph if it was taken on a bad camera. I suggest that people opt to purchase a good camera and lens, instead of Photoshop. By using a high-quality camera, you will have to do less photo editing. With iPhoto, you can crop and resize images quite easily, adjust the photo filters and lighting (with moderation). iPhoto allows you to bulk-export images to the sizes and specs you need (tutorial I wrote for on White Oak). You can read more iPhoto tutorials here.

Photo Collages - Picasa: Picasa is through Google. It allows you to organize, store, and edit your photos. It is not as smooth as iPhoto, but it works very well to put together photo collages - i.e. two vertical photos together, etc. If photo editing and collages are not that intuitive to you, I would recommend going through the tutorials that each piece of software provides. You can also view youtube videos online.

If you have specific questions about any of these products or a question for “Techie Tuesday”, either leave a comment below or you can write me at hello (a) whiteoakcreative (dot) com.