What I Know--{The Gunny Sack}

Hey friends! I am excited to have my sweet friend Tonia here today. She has a really wonderful site with lots of fun tutorials, recipes, photography tips & more!

Check her out..

Hello Southern Lovely readers...I'm Tonia from The Gunny Sack. I am really excited to be here on my friend's site as part of this fun series. Of course, Lindsay gave me several months notice but I waited until the last minute to write my post! And I had no idea what to do the post about because I don't feel like I am an expert about anything so I decided to go with a "current issue"...LOL!

I'm not sure if you were aware but Picnik is going away...GASP!! So, everyone is asking what they are going to use now. The most popular answer is to get Photoshop but due to the cost, that isn't an option for everyone. So, I am going to show you how to use Google+ to edit your photos.

Go to your Google+ profile and click on the second box that says Photos if you hover over it.

Click on Your Albums, over on the left side.

Here are some of my albums. Click on Upload New Photos in the upper right corner.

Type in a new album name or choose to add your pictures to an existing album. Then, drag your photos over to this page or click on the blue Select Photos From Your Computer button.

Once your pictures have loaded, click on Create Album. At this time, you will have the option to share this album or keep it private.

Click on the album you just created. When you hover over it, the pictures will fan out.

Choose the picture you want to edit.

Once the photo opens, click on Creative Kit in the upper left corner.

The Creative Kit options will show up. If you've used Picnik before, the tools will be very familiar to you. There are basic editing options such as crop, rotate, exposure, colors, sharpen and resize. There are 25 different choices under effects! Under the decorate tab there are 20 various choices and over 100 fonts available in the Text tab.

This picture needs to be cropped, so I chose the option on the left and after moving the grid until it is in the correct position and clicked apply.

After cropping the picture, I want to add my blog's name. Under the text tab, I typed The Gunny Sack in the box on the upper left. Then, I chose the font Courier New and clicked add. I moved the words to the place I wanted and slid the fade slider on the right to the middle to fade the text some and then I saved it.

And this is how the picture turned out. So, Google+ has many of the options that Picnik has and it's easy to use. Other free online photo editing options include PicMonkey (started by former Picnik employees), FotoFlexer and BeFunky. If you are looking for something to download, try GIMP or Picasa.

One of the options I am really going to miss is being able to make a collage on Picnik. It was a great way to make printables! But it sounds like PicMonkey is going to have that option soon so that's good news!

Thanks for having me as your guest today, Lindsay and I hope all of you will stop by The Gunny Sack and check out what I've been working on!

This is very helpful & a wonderful tutorial on how to edit photos. Sure wish Picnik wasn't going away, but this is a great alternative! Thanks for helping the rest of us out, Tonia!

I also wanted to remind you all that Pamela of PB&J Creations is still offering her 10% discount for another week, by using code SouthernLovely10