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PixlrNowadays, most of us take photos with our cell phones and, thanks to the cloud, we can instantly share them with our family, friends, and followers. Unfortunately, most of the pictures in our camera rolls aren’t perfect and need to be edited in some way. Whether it’s to remove red-eye or crop out some random guy’s arm, photo editing has become a necessary tool and that’s why I use Pixlr Express.
Back in the day, when I wanted to edit my pictures, I’d open Photoshop and go do a few chores while the resource-hogging program loaded. Then came the tedious process of loading the photos I wanted from my digital camera onto the computer. Once I narrowed down the selection from the thirty similar looking shots of St. Peter’s Square, I had to wait again for the images to load in Photoshop. After fiddling around with different settings and plugins for hours, I’d be too worn out to upload the results of my hard work to Facebook because it was such a hassle. Thankfully, technology has made the process of digital editing a whole lot easier.
Enter Pixlr Express, an online editing application that is completely free to use. In addition to your typical editing tools like brightness, contrast, crop, resize, vibrance and hue/saturation, Pixlr includes texture overlays, stickers and a litany of other options to enhance your images.
Getting started is so easy. You can either browse your computer for a photo, enter a URL to grab one from the internet or take one using your webcam.
After opening an image, click ‘adjustment’ and the various editing options will appear as icons over the picture.
If you’re short on time, Autofix is a quick way to edit your photo. Using an advanced algorithm, Pixlr will decide what needs to be corrected automatically. Otherwise, you can choose from the many options. I typically start with resize and crop then brightness and contrast and if I’m feeling particularly adventurous, I’ll give vibrance a go. Simply drag the slider on each setting to either increase or lessen the effect. Make sure to hit ‘apply’ in order for each change to take effect.
Earlier I mentioned some additional options that include textures and stickers. There are several presets you can choose from to superimpose a grainy effect over your picture. In the example below, I used a purple Tie Dye overlay. Things can get quite messy quickly so use caution when experimenting. A little goes a long way!
When you’re done with your adjustments, be sure to click ‘save’ on the upper left. A window will pop up giving you a chance to rename the image and to set the jpeg compression.
After playing around with borders and stickers, here is my final result! Quite Pinterestsy, don’t you think?
Pixlr is available online, on the App Store and Google Play. Happy editing!
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