The majority of you know how much I love photography and now with digital photography I am loving all the different programs available for photo editing. My three favorites are Adobe PhotoShop, iPhone’s CameraBag for Windows and Picnik. I use all three quite frequently and sometimes even all three on one photo. The most expensive of the three is PhotoShop which I currently do not have as I only had a 30 day trial but it was well worth it. I had a trial version of PhotoShop CS4 and loved it! The best thing about it is all the different things you can do with PhotoShop and I hope to soon be in possession of the program to expand my photo-editing horizons. Here’s an example of one of my edits with this most expensive but amazing software: 

Washington Square Park, Manhattan, NY

Now here is the original 

Washington Square Park Original

See how much more enhanced the edit is? I think I used some kind of light action on that one, don’t quite remember what it was that I used but I know that I loved the way it looked! 

On to CameraBag! At $19 for a direct download I could not pass this lovely editing tool up! I fell in love with the application while perusing photos on Flickr. So many people use it to edit their iPhone photos and I googled it to find out that they had recently made it available for Windows and Mac! It’s got some really great “filters” and I’ve enjoyed it very much. Here’s a photo edited using just CameraBag: 

Daniela and Carlos on the rooftop

Here is the original photo: 

Daniela and Carlos on the rooftop original

The original is great but I loved the vintage feel the CameraBag tool gave it! CameraBag is a bit limited but used with other editing tools it is absolutely wonderful and you can also apply multiple filters within CameraBag to come up with some amazing edits! It is worth buying. 

Picnik…oh Picnik! I love this editing software a lot! It has so many different features and is used to touch up and edit photos on Flickr which is how I first discovered it. You can use the free edition on their website but I think it is well worth paying the $24.95 for a year to get all the great tools they offer (the free edition has some great stuff but is a bit limited). I love the collage tools best and of course the effects are great as well! Here are a couple of edits I created using Picnik: 

Princeton Dinky, 1960s style edit from Picnik

"Winter", edited with Picnik soft focus filter

Aren’t those beautiful? I love using all three programs together and soon I will post more photos of that kind. I hope you’ve enjoyed these and will consider these three programs when deciding to purchase photo editing software. 

Cheers!