I recently had to buy a NEW laptop because I spilled water in my other one and fried my motherboard. Now I didn’t spill the water on purpose, I was trying to avoid my 2 year old from grabbing it out of my hand when some accidentally flung out of the glass onto my keyboard. Now that I had to almost start from fresh, I need to find a graphics program to install on this new laptop.

On my old laptop, I used a few FREE graphic software programs that I downloaded online. While sometimes FREE is the most cost effective way, sometimes FREE software does not do exactly what you want it to do. So now I am shopping for a graphics software program to suite my needs. Since I am a web designer and a blogger, I am looking for something with lots of options. I want to be able to create logos, button ads, banner ads as well as edit my thousands of pictures I am always taking of my family.

So I want to ask you, what is your favorite graphics program? Do you prefer Corel or maybe Photoshop? Feel free to share what program you have or use in the comments below.

Share This

Since I am a frugal person who saves money, I use “free graphic programs” rather then shelling out a ton of money buying one. The internet has quite a few FREE programs out there to edit and create images that are just as good as the programs you can buy.

I have heard lots of other moms talking about the program Picnik. This is a free graphics editor that is fun to use. It has a bunch of neat effects and fonts to use with your photos. What makes this program even better is you don’t have to download anything. You can create and edit your images online, without even creating an account. Of course you can create a FREE account or go with their Premium service that gives you more options. I went online this morning and looked for different tutorials for this program and found a fun one called Picknik Hair Color Fun. I just had to try it out with one of my photos of me and my son. In just a couple minutes, I turned this photo:

Into this fun photo below:

Neato huh?

Of course there is WAY more stuff you can do with Picnik. Last night I used my logo on one of my blogs to create a cute button image. If you love to play with graphics, I recommend playing around with this free program. There are lots of other tutorials you can find online, especially on YouTube.

If you need to make your own button image for your blog, I recommend taking a peek at Linda’s post “Make Your Own Cutest  EVER Blog Buttons For FREE“. She is the one originally introduced me to Picnik with her post.

Now go have some fun with Picnik too!

Share This

This is a sponsored guest post written by Matty T. on behalf of Logomyway. Post powered by Sponzai.

Need Amazing Custom Designs? LogoMyWay connects clients needing design work such as Custom logo designs, T-shirts designs, Business card designs and more to a thriving community of talented logo designers exploding with creativity. Start a logo design competition within minutes!

Share This

I just love cute free blog templates. Since I love creating different blogs, I get excited when I come across someone who offers templates that are different from the rest. Creating this blog post is a great way to bookmark the resource to so I know I can go back and find it when I need it.

The blog Candy’s Designer Templates. Here is the link: http://candytemplates.blogspot.com

Enjoy
Stefani

Share This

For those of you that use banner and button images to promote your website, I read a helpful tutorial for those who want to learn an easy way to create your own images. I am sure many of you pay for your images to be made by someone else. I will admit that I have paid for my own images. I have also learned how to create my own as well.

The post is on the blog A Cowboys Wife and titled “Blogging with Cents-How to Create a Simple Banner“.

Enjoy
Stefani

Share This

Have you been wanting to create a cute avatar for say Twitter, Facebook, Myspace or maybe your favorite forum?

There is a website called Zwinky that allows you to create your own FREE 3-D avatar.  You can customize your hair, eyes, skintone, clothing and more!

Enjoy
Stefani

Share This

If you are looking for a free graphics program, you can download a FREE Copy of Corel’s Paint Shop Pro X. All you have to provide is your name and email address to start the download.

Here is some info about the program:

Corel Paint Shop Pro X delivers a complete set of photo editing tools to help you create professional – looking photos fast! By combining automatic photo fixes and precision editing controls with a revolutionary Learning Center, Paint Shop Pro is a first of its kind – an easy-to-use photo editor for anyone who wants to create stunning photos straight out of the box.

Share This

Do you have the need to resize images? I sell advertising online and you don’t know how many times people will email me images that need to be resized. I either have to make them smaller or bigger. I have tried to use another software program to do this, but the program will either crash or doesn’t resize it how I would like it. There is a free software program called PIXresizer that just does image resizing. It makes the tasks very simple! If you are interested, please visit this link: http://bluefive.pair.com/pixresizer.htm

Share This

Do you blog? If you are a blogger like me, you can receive a FREE copy of PQ Talking Photo. To get a free copy, you must blog about it before Christmas. I think this software looks pretty cool. You can take any photo, drawing, sketch and animate it. Once I get my copy, I plan to have some fun with it and post some of the pictures on one of my websites.

Share This

For those of you who use the internet on a regular basis, you probably do something with images online. Rather you upload images to myspace or a blog, an image editing program is a great asset to have. I am always finding myself changing the size of an image to make it look better on a blog post or on one of my websites. For those of you that don't want to fork out any cash, there is a free image editor I just found out about. This free program is called FotoFlexer and has the ability to integrate with photo sites and social networking sites such as PhotoBucket and Myspace. 

The software is available for FREE download at: http://www.FotoFlexer.com 

Share This