{"id":10819,"date":"2017-03-29T12:00:34","date_gmt":"2017-03-29T17:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theedublogger.edublogs.org\/?p=10819"},"modified":"2017-03-28T12:01:41","modified_gmt":"2017-03-28T17:01:41","slug":"picmonkey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theedublogger.com\/picmonkey\/","title":{"rendered":"Using PicMonkey! My Favorite Free Online Image Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most difficult parts of negotiating blogging is images.<\/p>\n

I hate images.<\/p>\n

Really, really, really hate images. To me, a picture is a picture is a picture.<\/p>\n

Over the last few years, however, I’ve learned that image sizes are one of the most important parts of a blog layout when trying to ensure consistency across devices and platforms.<\/p>\n

This means I’ve had to expand my technological capabilities and my vocabulary.<\/p>\n

Collage makers<\/a> are great. Once the collage is completed, however, getting it to look right and be visually pleasing on both desktop and mobile<\/a> can pose a challenge.<\/p>\n

In this post, I\u2019ll walk you through some of the steps to adjusting pictures online using PicMonkey, although Pixlr also works similarly.<\/p>\n

Both of these are free web applications that allow you to change and enhance photos so that your website is the best looking version you can make.<\/p>\n

Key Terms<\/h3>\n

Before beginning the tutorial, a few key terms need to be defined.<\/p>\n

Crop<\/strong><\/p>\n

This means to take certain areas of a picture and focus them.<\/p>\n

For example, if a picture has a chair on the left and a bunch of nothing on the right, and you just want the chair\u2019s image, you crop the image to focus only on that. Keep in mind, this can change the pixel count.<\/p>\n

Cropping can also mean changing the proportions of an image so that a landscape image is changed to a portrait image. In other words, a long wide picture and be redefined as a tall skinny picture. This will change the focus of the image, so we need to keep that in mind.<\/p>\n

\"Crop\"<\/p>\n

Exposure<\/strong><\/p>\n

Back in the old days, exposure used to mean how much time the shutter was open impacting the amount of light through the lens.<\/p>\n

Today, when editing photos, it more generally means playing with the brightness, highlights, contrast, and shadows in a picture.<\/p>\n

For example, sometimes you take a picture in a dark room and the figures are difficult to see. With photo editing, you can adjust the brightness so that the figures are clearer. If the image is so bright that you can\u2019t make out the shapes, you can do the reverse.<\/p>\n

\"exposure\"<\/p>\n

Pixel<\/strong><\/p>\n

These are small dot like pieces of information that aggregate into a larger image. An easy way to think about them is to imagine coloring in a picture on graph paper. Each box gets one color. You color in groups of boxes to make up the picture.<\/p>\n

The smaller the boxes, the more defined the picture is. Pixels in images work the same way. The more pixels there are, the clearer the image is and the more it looks like the original image.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Pixels<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Resize<\/strong><\/p>\n

This seems\u00a0a lot like cropping, but what you\u2019re doing is changing the number of pixels to making the image larger or smaller. Assume you find a picture that looks great but needs to be wider, using resize you can do this.<\/p>\n

However, you need to keep in mind that when you resize an image it changes the pixel sizes and can make an otherwise crisp picture a bit blurry.<\/p>\n

Rotate<\/strong><\/p>\n

This basically means moving the image around. Sometimes it means flipping it to the mirror image; other times it means moving it in a clockwise\/counterclockwise direction.<\/p>\n

Important tip:<\/p>\n