When you’re a blogger, its pretty easy to spot you. You’re the one that always brings your camera with you, and is snapping a million pictures with your smartphone before you eat your food, drink your pumpkin spice latte, or find fall leaves on the ground!

Once you have your pictures, you often want to edit them! Now, of course you could spend a bunch of money and buy Photoshop, but there’s gotta be a better way! Right?

How about a super fast, easy, and FREE way to edit your photos? And yes, even get the glorious circle picture with text on it!

Head on over to Picmonkey.com – upload your picture, and follow along these tutorials! They’re super easy, my mom can even do it! ;) I love you mom.

*ps- I’m not being paid by picmonkey in any way, I just love their site and want to share an awesome tutorial with y’all!*

First off- you will see this first picture on the left, once you upload your image. Here you will find everything you need! Here’s a quick rundown of what they do:

• Crop Symbol (shows you all your basic edits you see in the picture – crop, canvas color, rotate, exposure, colors, sharpen, and resize)
• Magic Wand Symbol (This is where all your filters are)
• Lipstick Symbol (This is where you can touch up facial features (teeth whitening, blush, blemishes, etc)
• Text Symbol (add text to your picture)
• Butterfly Symbol (add overlay shapes to your picture)
• Frame Symbol (put a frame on your picture- also where you do cutouts!)
• Cross Stitch Symbol (add Texture to your picture)
• Apple Symbol (Themed effects, overlays, and more!)

To edit these first pictures we’re going to click on the Magic Wand Symbol! And I’m going to walk you through adjusting a few of these filters.

 

 

To apply a filter, all you have to do is click it, and then a little box will pop up, like the one in this picture. For this picture I wanted her face to be brighter, and the grass and lines in her shirt to be darker. To adjust the filter all you have to do is grab that little circle that is on the dark red right now, and move it around until its highlighted how you like!

If you adjust the fade, then it will allow some of the color to show through, whereas at 0% its going to be a completely black and white image.

 

 

This filter, just click the “Cross Process” button. You’re going to select your filter, Green, Blue or Red. This is going to give you that hue on top of your picture. I typically prefer Blue for my images, but if you are wanting something to be more cozy, Red might work better! Just play around with them until you like it.

Again, adjusting the fade will determine how much of the filter will be on the picture. For this one right about 64% worked best for what I was going for.

 

 

Dusk is the next filter I tried out. This one is super easy and applies a nice warm cozy hue over your picture. The only thing you need to adjust is the fade, which determines how much of the filter is on your picture. I liked how this picture looked with 65% of the filter. Play around with it to see what you like best!

 

 

Now – we all know it is the shiz when you have your picture on your sidebar and its in the shape of a circle, with text overlaying on it! But, maybe you don’t have the money to have a designer customize it, and you just want something simple and quick to put up? I got your back.

Once you’ve edited your photo with the filters, you’re going to click on the Frame Symbol, and then click on the top button Shape Cutouts. Then, click on the circle and viola! You’ve got a cutout of a circle on your image! All you have to do is drag the circle where you want it. You can adjust the size of the circle right there under the shapes, as well as the angle!  For this one, I got a little fancy and saved the circle, and then repeated the process and added another circle on top and to the side to make it more oval shaped.

NEXT, after you apply the circle, click on the Text Symbol and choose the font you want to use, then click, add text. Its going to put a box of random text on your image, all you have to do is click the box, type in what you want, change the color, size and move it to where you want! I wanted this one to overlay a little bit, but you could put it completely on your image, or completely off your image and underneath! Its up to you!

I hope I was able to teach you something and you enjoyed this picmonkey tutorial! I’m joining a couple gals that are talking about photography this week for a giveaway! Maybe you’ll use your paypal money winnings to grab that cute camera strap you’ve been watching on Etsy? I know I would! :)

 
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