In the Garden

Some random garden photos from the last week; bees are loving our no pesticide lawn- the dandelions are flourishing- lovely maple seeds hanging from the trees providing a nice frame for my garden helper- the heart warming blooms of the strawberry plants, can't wait to pick those babies.

All of these photos have been edited in Picmonkey- a very cool and free photo editing program. I haven't played much with this type of thing (outside of photoshop in school- which was not so much fun as it was an exercise in patience- not an easy program to drop into and use without spending considerable time learning how it works). Picmonkey is very easy to use, and  I can see that once you start fiddling with the photos it's pretty addicting. I tried to post a few photos that were just edited in my regular way (we use Irfanview for every day editing- colour adjustments, resizing, cropping etc. but it doesn't have any fun special effect filters) along with the ones that I toyed with, but they looked pretty bland next to the super saturated colours in the filtered ones.

The nice thing about Picmonkey is that you can make things look like a Polaroid or daguerreotype, or give it rounded corners and a vintage feel- and they do all the work for you- but you can still customise the degree of the effects. It takes seconds to use it, and you can also make collages and give people hats and mustaches if you want to- plus loads of other things. Of course I'm still thinking that you've got to start out with a basically decent photo if you want to get any sort of great result, but this program is super easy to use, so it's ideal to play around with every once in a while.