On Monday, we saw how to showcase your photos in professional cinematic presentations for free using animoto.com, and to embed the resulting videos on your wedding website pages. Today I continue the theme of totally free photo management and reveal another online resource to give you real control over your photos without lifting so much as a dime from your wedding budget.
Cropping a photo in WedShare's Photo Lab
If you’re posting photos on your own personal wedding website, you might be using a wedding website service like WedShare.com. With WedShare, you can get a free wedding website (again, saving your wedding pocketbook) with some great photo editing tools built right in. Let’s take it a step further, shall we?
Earlier this year, I heard some great things about using Adobe’s Photoshop.com while traveling. It sounded like an awesome way to get power-packed photo editing for free and really soup up your online, on-the-go photo-journaling. Photoshop.com is a web-based photo-editing studio available to all, and available for nothing. The fact that it doesn’t cost a cent is the obvious plus: Adobe Photoshop desktop is pricey, and while Photoshop.com is not the powerhouse that Photoshop desktop is, it still provides a lot of the basic tools that a photographer would use to touch up photos and ready them for online sharing. So rather than spend the big bucks, it’s a good bet that the editing and effects you need for your average day-to-day photos are available for free with Photoshop.com.
With Photoshop.com, you can edit, decorate, and share your photos
The "pop a color" effect enables you select a single color in a photo to "pop out"
Render and stylize your photos with a variety of effects, like this sketch filter
Another great advantage–and why it’s so good for traveling–is that it’s a completely online interface, so you can access it from wherever you have an Internet connection instead of requiring a thick, heavy software client to be installed on your computer.
The photo edit menu, simple and straightforward
You can easily add and position text, too
Ease of use makes Photoshop.com attractive for the casual user and busy engaged couple. While Adobe’s desktop applications can have a steep learning curve if you’ve never used them, the online Photoshop.com editor is quite straightforward.
Photoshop.com is also sharing- and social-networking-friendly. Drag and drop photos you’ve uploaded and touched up to Facebook, Photobucket, Flickr, and Picasa, as well as provide online links to your photos or albums to friends. You can store up to 2GB of photos on your free Photoshop.com account, and your photos are never resized, so it’s always the originals that you’re working with.
Each photo stored in your account can be linked to and embedded in website pages
When posting edited images to your wedding website, you can embed the photos on your website pages to display them there immediately, using provided links. Or, to allow your wedding website service to store the photos and control the sizing and placement, just save your edited pics from Photoshop.com onto your computer and upload them to your wedding website. For example, with WedShare you can upload entire folders of photos at a time, and a full WedShare membership gets you unlimited photo storage if you need it.
After considering the benefits of Photoshop.com to a budget traveler and amateur photographer like myself–no cost, easily accessible, simple to use and sharing-friendly–I realized that those same benefits make it a great resource for the engaged couple as well. Free is always good, as the budget is forever a factor, and the ease of use really greases the skids for getting your pics touched up, edited, and online at your shared album or website. If you’re creating printed maps, programs, stationery items, or slideshows for your guests, it’s always nice to have a powerful photo editor handy, and this one is available to you right now.
Photo credits: Screenshots and images by Adobe Photoshop.com
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