September Challenge: Manipulating Your Photos by Fay/Lala

Now I understand that most of you do not have photoshop but perhaps might have fun playing with your photos. To my mind, photoshop takes an investment of time to learn to use and of course there is a cost involved. I have a very basic edition of photoshop and use it for some editing particularly for adding text, changing perspective, cloning and healing areas of a photo or making a collage, but I have not gotten into the more complicated things. It is also fun to play around with some of the special effects.

One day when I had way too much time on my hands, I stumbled on the Fotor site and found it fun and relatively easy to use… and FREE! The more I explored, the more things I discovered that it could do. At first I thought it was only for collages but it does so much more (scroll to the very bottom of the Fotor site for choices). And that led me in search of photos to be manipulated.
This does come with a precaution:
It can eat up a bunch of your time as you become engrossed in the possibilities!

http://www.fotor.com/features/collage.html

That’s when I thought that the crazies might also have fun with it. I know a lot of you are on facebook and maybe would like to play with a photo before posting. And for that matter… the basic editing tools I have found to work quite well to improve your images… adding some clarity, contrast, sharpening, cropping. Very helpful!

And that color image where the color is really off and you can’t make it look right… just turn it into a black and white, add some contrast and it is like magic!

It is also easy to frame your image which may give it a better presentation.

And I know that some of you might like to add text to an image and this program can do that too. Now you are unable to warp the text, as in make it in an arc shape or some weird funky display like in PS but for basic text, it works extremely well and has a variety of font choices.

I do hope you have had fun working with it and I have gotten some great images thus far. I am going to post several of my own images so that you can see some of the possibilities and if you have not yet tried it, I hope these examples might encourage you to explore what might be done with a few clicks of your mouse and moving a few sliders. It is not very difficult once you get the hang of it.

If you wish to play with some of your images and send them my way, I will be happy to share them with the rest of the group.
Merrie made this comment: “I found the program very easy to work with. I had fun trying all the different effects. In the end I only used the black and white and then framed it. But had lots of fun playing with the program.”

Now this first one shows the original color shot of Dallas. I brought it into Fotor, made it black and white and added some texture and then put it in a collage format to display on the blog.
REMEMBER: YOU CAN CLICK ON ANY OF THESE IMAGES TO SEE LARGER!

Before and After

Dallas Skyline
(Photo by Fay/Lala)

This next one may look like a black and white photo but it is not. It is just a photo of my first digital camera shot on a white background. In Fotor I added the text and the frame.

Life is Like a Camera
(Photo by Fay/Lala)

This next one, I made use of selective coloring, text and then added a frame.

Jivin’ to the Music
(Photo by Fay/Lala)

You can also make a banner. This was a photo of a hologram of an eye. I added it to a banner and added a graphic from the Fotor site and then added text at an angle.

You are being watched!
(Photo by Fay/Lala)

This was a photo of a sculpture which was originally red in color (you can see the sculpture in Robin’s birthday greeting that was posted previously) and I created a dramatic effect and added some graphics which give it a whole different look!

Wild and Crazy Guy!
(Photo by Fay/Lala)

Montage photos are fun! Cut out part of one photo and place it on top of another. Change the size and the angle as need be and then finalize your crazy image!
See… I told you this was fun! (Click on photo to see larger)

Play with your photos…
(Photo by Fay/Lala)

My apologies to Tess for using her as a guinea pig but she gives me so many good photo ops!

Nature Girl
(Photo by Fay/Lala)

Let me share with you the one I did of my grand-daughter. And just today, I discovered how to adjust the sizes of the photos in a collage format on the Fotor site and how to add text to a collage. I didn’t think you could do that. It is still a learning curve.

Lala in my eye…
(Photo by Fay/Lala)

Lastly… my sweet girl… Mollie Sue.

Mollie Sue
(Photo by Fay/Lala)

So, get busy having fun and playing with your images. If you have not tried this and still want to submit an image for the challenge… you have time. Lots you can do and you just may find a use for an image that you might have considered deleting previously. You also may start shooting differently when you have a concept in mind.