Kids with Animals - 11

Earlier in this series, I introduced our dog Benny as a puppy. He’s one of the best dogs that I’ve ever known. We adopted him from the local animal shelter. He’s 100% mutt and perfect. I love his personality and he has this amazing long hair like a spaniel. In this photo, he has a summer haircut. When the days are hot, it’s the kindest thing that we can do for him; besides making sure he has plenty of fresh water and shade.

I’ve got three pictures of Amanda with Benny that I want to share in this series. Amanda is our youngest child. She is my inspiration for my parenting blog at Amanda’s Books and More.

I edited this photo in Picasa 3. I used saturation and boost. I’m not sure what the difference is, but I was trying to bring out more color as Amanda was nearly pure white. The warmify tool didn’t work for me. If it had a bar where I could choose how much warmth, then it probably would have worked.

One neat option that Picasa 3 has with text is that you can outline your letters. I did just that using gray for the inside and black for the outline.

Kids with Animals - 7

This photo is of Samantha with our puppies in 2005. It’s a bittersweet photograph, because it was taken when we still had both Sasha and Benny. The orphaned pups grew up with us, but for certain reasons we felt that Sasha would be better off with another family. She adjusted to her new family so well that when my husband went to visit, she didn’t want to go to him. He realized that she was afraid that he would take her away and this was a good sign.

How to Edit a Photo Using Picasa 3:
I used Picasa 3 to edit this photo. I chose the black paintbrush icon and clicked on Sharpen. This tool has to be used very carefully, because it can quickly turn a smooth image into a grainy one. I then went to the blue paintbrush icon and added a bit of Boost to bring out the colors and Vignette to add the dark border. That’s all the editing I did, but I still had one more application left and that was Text, which is the spanner icon. This was my first time using Picasa 3’s text on one of my images. It takes a little getting used to. Also, the font that I normally used in Picnik was not on the list, so I went with Segeo Print in bold. I think I like this font better.

Kids with Animals - 6

I’ve been having a lot of fun with this series of photos. This picture of Samantha with our puppy Sasha was taken at the same time as the one with Jeremiah and our puppy Benny. The puppies were an orphaned brother and sister, which we adopted from our local animal shelter. We don’t have Sasha anymore. We gave her to an elderly couple who adored her and gave her the affection she craved.

How to Edit a Photo Using PicMonkey:
This photo was edited using PicMonkey. I clicked on Exposure and reduced brightness. Then I went to Colors and slightly increased the saturation and temperature. I noticed there was a stain on Sammy’s shorts, so I chose the lipstick icon to the left and clicked the Blemish fix a couple of times at that exact spot. Satisfied with my results, I saved it.

Now that I know there are great editing tools out there, I’ll have less regrets with the photos I take. I wish you joy in taking pictures of your kids and lots of fun editing them too.

Kids with Animals - 5

Yesterday, I didn’t have much time to photoshop Jessica with the kitten, so I chose one effect (one click) and presto… I was done. Today, I took my time trying out the different special effects by PicMonkey. They certainly have a variety of editing tools available. So, before I tell you what I used on this picture, I thought I’d let you take a guess first. What do you think?

Well, I got both my husband and my son involved in helping me choose just the right effect. In the end, we all agreed that none was best. That’s right… I didn’t use anything. The only thing I did to this photo was to crop it, resize it smaller and add text. The lesson in this is that sometimes it’s too easy to get photoshop happy, forgetting that the original is sometimes the better choice.

This photo is of my son, Jeremiah, and our puppy, Benny. It was taken in 2005.