Editing Using the Software Picnik

By Namibia McLean

This is the starting page from the website ‘picnik’. The software itself is used all over the world giving professional finishes to photos and its main purpose is to help edit photos in general. This can be a range from giving the photo special effects or even just turning the photo black and white. To start off I press the ‘Get started now’ button.

This is the welcoming page of Picnik. It provides a range of examples of the of finished photos. There is a premium option in which an individual can pay a monthly price to get professional and more classy finishes to photos. However for now I’m going to use the non premium version and to start this I press ‘Upload a photo’ button.

This is what follows on from pressing the ‘Upload a photo’ button. As you can see there are a range of files that I can pick from however I’m using this site to edit my photos for magazine. Additionally this photo will go on my contents page. All I simply have to do is select the photo that I want to edit and then press ‘Open’.

This is what happens after. On this page I can change the colour of the graphic and make the image sharper. However I don’t need to do any effects to the image in this way so I can skip this part. To move on I press the ‘Create’ button

Once I’m on the create page I can be more technical in how I want my picture to look. For example I can put her in a frame, boost the colours or even change the colour of the graphic altogether. Additionally I don’t need to do any of these things as my aim to put her into a polaroid so to get to this I press on the frame button and it then presents me with the options shown on the left.

This is the effect I am going for. To get the graphic to look like this I simply press on the Polaroid option located on the bottom left and it presents me with what is shown.

The problem with Picnik is that it won’t let an individual take away the background behind the actual Polaroid structure. Thinking ahead I know that editing the photo in Photoshop CS3; keeping the white Polaroid background will take quite a lot of time and thought so to to save that process I make the background purple so that I can use the quick selection tool to erase the purple and keep the Polaroid structure.

Also Picnik provide the option of rotating the Polaroid either to a left diagonal, a right diagonal or just in centred which centred is the look I am going for, for now. To do this I slide the slider to the middle so that it makes my Polaroid centred.

This is my final product