MORE FUN WITH PICMONKEY and a VIDEO TUTORIAL

PicMonkey's landing page - as you can see, it's free free fee!

I've decided PicMonkey - a free online image editor - is the greatest thing since sliced bread! When you look at what I've done here... all I can say is that it would probably take me the best part of a day to reproduce all these effects, when it's taken me around 20 minutes to do BOTH pictures!

Image from the Windows 'Sample Pictures' folder (which came with my  Windows 7)
Size is 1024 x 768 pixels, 606 KB

After I played around in PicMonkey. Saved at 1092 x 796 pixels, 775 KB

Not hard at all - I just played around with all the special effects! The ticket came in the Overlays > Labels section in the sidebar. Click on an image, hold down the shift key and you can tweak the horizontal or vertical as desired. Click on the image and drag the points at the corners to resize the entire image.

Image from Life is Beautiful on Tumblr: size 500 x 500 px, 189 KB

The finished result: 610 x 719px, 84.6 KB

Another image

Image from Life is Beautiful on Tumblr, size 400 x 287 px, 25.7 KB - pretty low resolution

The finished result - you can tell I like that italic font. Size is 356 x 419px, 44.4 KB

TWO SHORT VIDEOS I've made, showing what I did and how I did it. Just to give you a few ideas.






Showing the final tweaks and finished result:

Original image from Life Is Beautiful on Tumblr

SIZE MATTERS - oh, yes, it does!

Mamarog left a comment on my original PicMonkey post, asking whether you save your PicMonkey at a large size when you save, ready to download back to your computer. Yes you can!If you upload at a large size, you can save as a thumbnail, medium size or large size (there's a choice of three sizes, all with names - see above). 

Common sense suggests:

If you upload a smaller size, like the tumblr image, then I'd advise you save at small or medium in case of pixellation (which can look very cool... if it's what works with that particular image...). Just look at the captions under the pictures to see the original and saved sizes. As you only have 3 choices, they won't be exactly the identical size, but near enough not to matter. The largest size (Russell) is a high enough resolution for excellent results when printing.

I hope this helps, and you'll have fun with this wonderful programme!