Free Photoshop Classes! Registration Begins on Monday!

Hey everyone, join me at Jessica Sprague for her 2 year Birthday Bash. She is offering free Photoshop classes, giveaways and tips from other designers all on her site. Registration begins this Monday! Don't miss out. Its a great way to get your feet wet in Photoshop and if you are a scrapbooker a great way to learn digital scrapbooking techniques. I plan to attend and take all the classes. Can't attend? Jessica Sprague offers on line courses all year round. Costs vary, but once you order the course, you own it for life and can always go back and practice what you learned. I think this is the best training on Photoshop I have ever seen! Let me know how you do and what you thing!

Registration opens this Monday for the free class Photo Editing: Frame-Ups & Special Effects. In this brand-new class, you'll soak up dozens of awesome techniques to add effects to your photos, including brushes, frames, masks, textures, blending modes, filters and more! Don't worry about the class filling up-they've got plenty of space for you and your friends. But you have to register between June 22 - 28! So spread the word with our blog badges or by tweeting, posting on Facebook or emailing your friends and family.

Picniking is so much fun!

I have to tell you, I have just been playing around on the Picnik site that I mentioned earlier and have been having so much fun! You can too at www.picnik.com. It is so worth $25.00 a year for the advanced program but even if you aren't interested in paying for it, they offer many free programs you can try. You just load up your photos and start playing. This is a photo collage option that I just had to do. Isn't it fun? Not only that I cropped these photos, adjusted the color for better saturation, sharpened the image and edited a little bug right off the photo. Some of the petals were browning a bit, so I just put some blemish repair on them. Wait until you see the photos I am going to post tomorrow. A before and after of a sweaty speaker with lots of shine and glistening. I used Picnik, and voila! All gone. Check it out tomorrow.

This weekend I went into town to see the Cherry Blossoms around the Washington DC area. I simply love them as you can see. I am sure I will be posting more photos soon, but these pictures are gorgeous! Its my favorite time during the spring season. When the wind blows, its like little pink petal tears are floating all around the city. They almost smell like cotton candy! Okay, maybe some of that is my imagination but I have to tell you its magical. Enjoy my photos, let me know your thoughts. I will be posting them on my ETSY site as photos as well as cards if you are interested.

Learning with ETSY

Recently I opened a shop on ETSY. I wanted to try my hand at selling crafts, photographs, etc. so decided to give it a try. Its actually very easy but where I got stuck was in the loading of photos. I immediately went over to the ETSY chat rooms and sent a question out to the group. I was having trouble with blurry photos in the listing. I asked if anyone had any recommendations for how to correct this. I learned that photos have to be saved at a certain size. When you take pictures with a digital camera they aren't always taken at a level satisfactory for posting and in addition when you use a higher resolution camera sometimes the photos can be too large. To fix the problem you need to utilize software that allows you to enlarge or reduce the photo. This of course was all new to me. I have PhotoShop Software but didn't really know how to use it. I asked for recommendations and was immediately directed to this fantastic site! I highly recommend you check out http://www.picnik.com/. Its so easy to use and so much fun. I have played around with my pictures with this new site as well. Just look at the little spring geese I have made for cards and photos. I also recommend you upgrade for the cost of $24.95 a year so you can take advantage of all the features. If you are new to photography and want to have some fun creating and improving in the process, then this is the place to go. You simply upload the photo you want to correct, adjust or fit, and you are on your way. You can't harm the photo, as you keep the original on your desk top. Just make sure to change the title when you save it. I tried all the special effects, all the cropping, all the text (this can be used to add text (watermark) to protect your photo rights). If you sign up for the program please tell them you heard about it on the Born Barefoot Blog!