Goodbye Picnik - Hello PicMonkey!

I've had a few emails and comments over the weekend asking which programme I was using to edit my photos. Like many bloggers I was rather sad panicked when Picnik said they were closing down. Ever since Rebecca told me about them I'd been using Picnik to help me easily create the collages that I've used to show of my new designs - nice rounded corners, great colour effects, easy cropping and great frames for the photos, and I loved the fact that I could drag and drop photos I'd uploaded into the collage templates. What on earth was I going to do without them? Oh, I knew that there were software packages out there that would do much the same job for me, but I also knew that they would take more than just a few clicks of buttons and dragging the cursor around the screen - and I knew that I didn't have the time, or to honest the inclination, to learn how to use them. So I was very relieved when I read about PicMonkey in the emails the Picnik team sent out! It's been developed by the some of the old Picnik team, and would you believe it, PicMonkey is even better than Picnik was!

This is the front screen that greets you when you reach the website. At the moment there's no need to register and no fee, although I suppose they may eventually end up with a small fee for premier effects like Picnik did. See the picture in the top left? All you need to do to get started is to open up a window with your picture files, choose the one you want to edit and drag it across. No more waiting for files to upload!

Once you've done that, the editing page opens up - and it is so easy to use. The clicking on the symbols on the left of the screen shows you different menus of effects. Basic edits allow you to crop, resize and do things like change the exposure.  

Other menus add frames, overlays (you can upload your own - perfect for adding a logo to your pictures for example), and textures. I've been having fun adding text to some of my photos - it's so quick to colour, tilt and resize, and there are some great fonts to choose from. I can see this being very useful for adding labels to the photos I do for my tutorials.

And this is what I ended up with - if I hadn't kept stopping to take screenshots to show you it probably would have only taken me a couple of minutes at most. The only thing that PicMonkey doesn't have at the moment is a collage tool, but that is apparently coming soon. I'm not panicking anymore!