Week 11: The Message Behind The Picture

In this week’s class, we were asked to choose a picture and edit it using any picture editor. The picture must have a message behind it so that I can use it in the teaching and learning process later. It was a task that we need to upload to Photobucket later.

Below is the picture that I have edited using Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Photoscape. Using Photoshop, I cut my picture and inserted it into Taj Mahal’s picture. Before that, I have brightened the Taj Mahal picture so that it suits my picture. After that, I uploaded it into Photoscape and added some glittering text to the picture. After I have satisfied with the picture, I uploaded it to Photobucket as instructed by Puan Foziah.

When I was doing this task, I also tried to use other picture editing softwares. But I cannot use them as good as I use Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Photoscape. These were among the softwares that I have tried;

Picasa

Picasa is a free photo editing program created by Google. It's useful for home users or beginners to find, edit and share their photographs online with Picasa Web Albums (free photo album hosting from Google).

With Picasa, you can eliminate scratches & blemishes, fix red-eye, and crop your images. It's also useful for creating movies, collages and slideshows from your digital photographs.

Picnik

Picnik is a free online photo editor that allows you to crop, resize, rotate, add special effects such as text or shape overlays. Note: Picnik is the same editor that the Picasa software above implements in their program. Other social networking sites using Picnik include MySpace, Flickr, Photobucket, and Webshots.

Picnik works on Windows, MAC and Linux. No download is required and nothing to install. You can start using Picnik by going to: http://www.picnik.com/

GIMP

Gimp is a fully fledged photo editing software aimed towards those who are more technically minded. I say this because the last time I looked, there was quite a bit involved in getting the software up and running. However, don't let this put you off having a look. They have fantastic documentation to help you get started.

GIMP offers advanced photo retouching techniques such as correcting lens distortion and vignetting, cloning and healing tools. I was also impressed that it had support for drawing tablets, which is unusual for free photo editors.

Adobe Photoshop Express

Photoshop Express is a free online photo editing program from Adobe. All it requires is registration and you can touch up, tweak and tune your images before sharing them on Facebook or Flickr. A really neat part of Photoshop Express, is that you get to store up to 2GB of photographs on Adobe.

After doing this task, I realize that there are many picture editing softwares in the internet. I just have to find and explore them myself. It would be very useful for me if I know how to use many picture editing softwares. I can create different types of teaching aids to be use in the classrooms.

All and all, thanks to Puan Foziah for the task given.