Barla Banana Blog: {Editing your own Photos. How to Create Birthday Invitations, Birth Announcements or Greeting Cards Using Picasa Photo Editor.}

In the last few weeks, I have been asked several times about the way I have created the "announcement" type photos with the text on them.

For the last few years, I have been using the photo editor Picasa.
Because it is powered by Google, it was always a simple process, as a blogger and sometimes-photog enthusiast, to slip from one facet to the other.
Blogger is also linked to Picasa, which makes adding photos to the blog super simple.
Most people who are asking are not interested in photo editing for blogging puposes, though, so I will not go into detail in that regard.

Not long after I began blogging, I was introduced to Picnik.

While Picasa was the cake, Picnik was the icing.

It was a sad day when Google (who owns both) decided to merge the two...makes sense from a biz perspective, but I still miss some of the coolness factor of Picnik, for things like:

-Teeth whitening (oh, yes!)

- rounded edges

and most of all, collages.

Picasa and Google + have kept the main features and I have been happy enough with the ones that are still available.

You can still apply text, change the coloration, saturation, filter, add sticker and images and so on.

I am going to walk you through the process I followed in order to create Gavin's 5th birthday invitation/announcement.

Before I begin, let's just assume you are going to go ahead and download Picasa 3.9 for your photo storing and editing. My instructions will not take you very far without it :)

When you download Picasa, your photos will automatically be loaded into the Picasa viewer.

If your photos are categorized in folders, the folders will appear as they are from your hard drive.

So here, I have opened Picasa and found the photo from the folders listed on the left sidebar.

I have selected the one photo I am interested in editing.

There is a fair amount of editing you can do without ever leaving Picasa...feel free to experiment on your own using Picasa's editing tools too. However, if you want the greater variety of features, click on the box that says "Edit in Picnik". I'm still confused why it doesn't say "Edit in Google +", but anyway.

The opening page will look like this. You can do any adjusting here that you wish. Perhaps you want to crop to only show the face...do all the preliminary stuff here.

I'm going to click on "Text".

I come to this page.

Here I type whatever I want to add in the small text box.

I experiment with different texts, colors and sizes.

You may add shapes to your image, like I have used on Ember's 1st birthday invite.

Adjust the size by clicking and dragging edges.

You can change it's color as well.

Anytime you add something that can be resized, colored or altered in any way, a box as shown above will appear. Use this to find the exact sizing and color you are looking for. Be aware of the number value shown above the color box...like this one: 00456B

You will thank me for telling you this when you realize you'll want to have this number the same for all the words you add. In this particular photo, I only used white, which was easy...but when you get into shades of blues, greens or any other color, for that matter...getting the exact match is extremely important. Slight differences show up on the developed print.

You can change the number value by highlighting it, typing the correct number and hitting enter. REMEMBER TO HIT ENTER.

There are lots of ways to have piles of fun with "Picnik" or Google +.

When you have decided on your final product, you will want to save to Picasa.

You will find the blue "Save to Picasa" button in the top right corner.

A box like the one above will appear and will prompt you to save. I ALWAYS choose "Save a new copy" so that down the road, I have the original if I want to make changes.

In instances where I have chosen to replace, it's because I didn't really like the original to begin with and the edited version was hands down the improvement.

You will then be redirected back to Picasa and "Picnik" will close.

Once you have saved and edited till your heart's content, find the little disk icon above your photos (right beside the "share" drop-down menu). Click on it to ensure that all the edits you have worked for hours and hours on have been saved to your hard drive. If you forget to do this.......don't worry. It will be saved in Picasa...just not on your computer.

If you chose to enable Picasa Web Albums, I would suggest then clicking the "Sync to Web" button on the top right.

You will need to do this for each individual folder.