blogging tips — Page 7

Blogging Tips – Daily Drop Cap

March 25, 2012 at 10:24 am by Claudia

unday mornings tend to be the only time I can explore new-to-me blogs. I sit here in the quiet and click one link, which leads me to another, which leads me to another. It reminds me of the time period when I first discovered the world of blogs. Oh my! I was like a kid in a candy store. I couldn’t believe I had finally discovered the existence of a world that had been out there all along. Remember those days?

One blog I stumbled upon a while back is The Handmade Home, a lovely design blog written by a young (to me) 30-something blogger. She has a regular feature called The Font Snob Club, where she shares interesting font sources that are free. As you know, I love fonts. Snob is not a word I like to associate with myself, but I suspect I am a bit of Font Snob. I sure appreciate an interesting and unique font and, goodness knows, I’ve changed the fonts on this blog often enough! The most recent edition of The Font Snob Club referenced an amazing site called Daily Drop Cap. Oh my goodness. Jessica Hische, an illustrator and designer, has posted an illustrative initial capital letter daily (since 2009) that you can use – for free – in your personal blog posts. They are not for commercial use.

I’ve used one at the beginning of this post. I also went back and edited my previous post and added one there. I love, love and love (again) them. There are twelve different alphabets and all you have to do is click on the letter you want to use and easy instructions for adding it to your post magically appear.

et’s try another one.

nd one more.

Be still my heart.

Stop by Daily Drop Cap and explore. You’ll be entranced. And be sure to leave a comment thanking Jessica if you use any of her Caps – I just think it’s the polite thing to do.

Have a wonderful Sunday.

Blogging Tips – PicMonkey

March 14, 2012 at 8:00 am by Claudia

I feel like I should dressed in prison garb, singing “Working on the Chain Gang.” I’ve been picking up hundreds of rocks…and there are thousands more out there. It’s repetitive, endless and my back is screaming. The dogs are even bored by the whole thing. But I’m recycling them. Some are forming a dry creek bed at the back of the house. The big ones are edging my gardens.

Today I’m going to talk about PicMonkey, another photo editing site that I’ve just recently discovered. This is a really neat site – very user-friendly, very much like Picnik, and they are soon adding a collage feature! Let me show you some of their tools and the way the site looks.

This is the home page. Do you see that message on the right? “Collage and more coming soon.” Good news!

Later on, I’ll show you what I did with that photo. Here you see the usual Basic Edits: Crop, Rotate (with “Straighten” which is not found on every photo editing site) Exposure, Colors, Sharpen and Resize. The Sharpen tool is much like Picnik’s in quality. My one beef with iPiccy is that their Sharpen tool is too grainy.

Here you see Effects. There are lots more of them as you scroll down the page.

Oooh! Touch up. Wrinkle removal, anyone?

Text/fonts. They are a bit limited but I’m sure they’ll have even more as time goes on. My favorite font is still over at iPiccy. After I work on a photo, I just upload it to iPiccy for my watermark.

These are Overlays. They’re really neat – they’re found on lots of photo editing sites, but I think PicMonkey’s are much more user friendly. I’ll show you what I did with this at the end of the post.

And finally, borders/frames. Again, a little limited, but I really don’t use these except for the occasional drop shadow.

Now for the photo. I resized, worked with exposure and color and then I played around a little. I added a little ‘Yester-color” and “Soften” and came up with this:

I didn’t round those corners, but there they are – maybe it’s part of Yester-color. Probably should have cropped around that, but hey, I’m just playing. That’s a PicMonkey font. Isn’t this pretty? Dreamy. And it makes the den look a lot better than it actually looks. I can’t see any dog hair on the chair. And it’s there. Believe me.

I then discovered Overlays and played around with the same photo.

I used the rectangle shape, made it opaque and then added text. Lots of bloggers are doing this sort of thing now and I rather like it. You could use it for a tutorial or to label a specific photo or to make it more Pinterest-worthy. More on Pinterest later this week, by the way. If anything, I’m even more troubled about that site.

I really, really like PicMonkey. It’s my new overall favorite. Ladies and gents – there is indeed life after Picnik. Give it a try!

Blogging Tips: iPiccy – Photo Editing Site

March 4, 2012 at 10:00 am by Claudia

Have you heard about iPiccy? This photo editing site is a great deal like Picnik, with many of the same features. It’s very user-friendly. It’s in the Beta stage, which simply means it’s still in the testing stage. Let me show you what I did with it yesterday.

Here’s what the site looks like:

By the way, I made that sign using the Painter feature. It’s pretty nifty. How about this one?

You can see Editor, Effects, Text, Retouch and Painter at the top of the window and each one of these has all sorts of individual features that show up on the left side of the screen. The usual things are there, as well as some others that I haven’t fully investigated. The Rotate and Flip tool is like Picnik’s in that you can straighten an image. I use that a great deal on Picnik, especially when I discover that the picture I took is slightly crooked. I haven’t found it anywhere else but on iPiccy.

iPiccy’s fonts are interesting and, for the most part, different than Picnik’s. Variety is the spice of life.

Okay, let’s look at some photos:

I grabbed this one out of my photo library. I played around with it in iPiccy and came up with this:

I played with saturation and something called ‘Bloom’ in the Effects. Just for fun, I added a Drop Shadow Frame. I added a watermark using this pretty text, which is called Quilline Script. I rather like it.

Here’s the same photo edited with Engrave Photo:

Next up is a photo of Ms. Scout:

She’s a photogenic little cutie, isn’t she?

I did the usual: resized the photo, cropped it and used the Cross Process effect, which I love. What’s nice about these effects is that you can control how much or how little of the effect you want. I just wanted a touch of it.

Now, here’s the neat thing: many of these sites are actively soliciting suggestions from all of us. So I sent an email to iPiccy suggesting they think of adding a collage feature because so many bloggers use Picnik’s collage feature to make banners and headers and all sorts of things. Almost immediately – on a Saturday – I received an email from a gentleman at iPiccy. He told me they are working on a collage feature as well as a layering feature right now and they should be adding them in about a week or so! This is great news for those of us who are searching for a way to make collages. I have no idea what this feature will be like or how similar or different it will be to Picnik’s but I sure am looking forward to exploring it. By the way, iPiccy has a Facebook page and they post about all their updates there.

There’s hope, fellow bloggers! There a lot of photo editing sites out there and I’m sure many of them are preparing to jump into the space vacated by Picnik. Every one of them is slightly different. Some are more like Photoshop Elements. Others are more like Picnik. They all want our suggestions.

In other news, the winner of the 3 Prime Suspect mysteries is Susy of The Feathered Nest! Susy, I’m sending an email your way. I need your address to forward to TLC Book Tours.

Have a great Sunday.

Blogging Tips – Daily Drop Cap

Blogging Tips – PicMonkey

Blogging Tips: iPiccy – Photo Editing Site

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