Everyone, this is Picnik. It’s free photo editing that works on Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket, and Webshots, or you can pull a photo off of wherever you store them on your computer and edit them on the Picnik site. Observe:

Here’s a photo of my kids, and all I did is resize it to 800 x 600, the standard size for Flickr.

I clicked the Auto-fix button, and then cropped out the feet showing on either side of the kids and also cropped out most of the tree, so that the kids became the focal point of the photo. Next, I worked on the exposure:

I applied color correction and sharpening, then went to the Create tab and chose a matte effect in green, changing the width and intensity of the color until it was just what I wanted. I had some fun with the editing tools, giving Nathan a Santa hat, adding text and a cluster of bells at the top. This will be an excellent way to make next year’s Christmas card photo!

Sometimes it really bugs me that I always seem to be the last one to know about something. I’ve been noticing that when I post comments on blogs, it shows the URL and link to my latest post for whichever URL I’ve used in the comment field. I finally took a closer look and saw that it is the Wordpress Comment Luv plugin, which you can find at here. I’ve installed it on all of my blogs, and I’m hoping it encourages more comments. For some reason MomReviews, which gets pretty decent traffic and has a lot of feed subscribers, gets the least number of comments of all my blogs besides this one.

So if you comment, look for a link to your most recent post underneath. It’s wicked cool!

From my friend Anna’s blog, I learned about a free download from the Vancouver Sun of an entire Christmas album! It’s got tracks by the Barenaked Ladies, Sarah McLachlan, The Weepies, Jars of Clay, and a few others I haven’t heard of. But I love Christmas music, so I’m downloading it anyway. The free download started this morning and goes for 48 hours, so if you want to get it, click over to the Vancouver Sun site and grab it for yourself!

It took me a long, long time to be able to understand how to get text where I want it on a page in relation to images. This is embarrassing to admit, but I just in the last MONTH learned how to make text align on the side of a photo! Because images copied from websites aren’t always standard sizes, sometimes it can be tricky to get text where you want it.

When you upload an image to a post, the code starts with

Okay, so not really anything to do with blogging, but I needed a place to post the images so my husband could see them from work

Another version: