land of the free because of the brave | happy independence day

 Thank you to all who have served and are serving to keep our country free and safe! Happy Independence Day!

The Heavens Declare....

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Psalm 19:1

The heavens proclaim his righteousness,

    and all peoples see his glory.

Psalm 97:6

In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth,
    and the heavens are the work of your hands.

Psalm 102:25

photography challenge | july

I'm planning on doing this photography challenge for July. Care to join?

Leave a comment with a link to your photos! Can't wait to see the creativity!

Check back every Friday--I'm planning to post the pictures from the past week then.

UPDATE: due to travels and life in general, I was not able to complete or post the July photo challenge. Maybe some other time when life slows down... ;) 

wordless wednesday

a tip for tuesday | cloning

Cloning is my newest editing love--the possibilities are endless! And, it's a good fix for someone who doesn't  have Photoshop. :)

Picture #1: notice my camera bag in the bottom left corner and my younger brother in the {almost} center. They both gotta go from the picture, so....

I cloned them out.

Picture #2: camera bag and extra person *poof!* gone! All from the simple magic of cloning.

In PicMonkey, the clone tool is in both the "effects" section and the "touch up" section at the very bottom.

The clone tool can be used for anything you want to "delete" from your picture.

Have you used this tool? If so, let me know how it went...I'd love to see your before and after pictures, too! :) 

Questions? Feel free to ask in a comment!

What to do?

{fully edited on PicMonkey}

Many of you have used Picnik for your photo editing. If so, you know that Picnik has closed and most of the effects were moved to Google+. This poses a problem if you aren't a Google+ user (like me)! What to do?

Before they closed, Picnik recommended two online editing sites; one of those was PicMonkey. I checked it out and fell in love! PicMonkey was created by former Picnik employees and has many of my favorite Picnik effects (Cross-Process, Eye Bright and Burst, to name a few), and several neat, new effects (including Urbane, Film-Stock and Tranquil). I noticed many Picnik users also wanted the Airbrush effect, which they couldn't find in many other online editing programs, but PicMonkey has that, as well. It's basically a smaller version of Picnik.

A few things I don't like about PicMonkey:
1) they don't have a wide variety of fonts. I mainly use fonts to create graphics (which I don't do very often), so this isn't a huge problem.

{both pictures below were edited on Picnik}

2) they don't have the "before and after" frame...I like seeing how my photo has changed, but since I don't typically save the picture with this frame, it's also not a big deal.

I highly recommend PicMonkey. Though they are still a work-in-progress, I am able to edit my pictures with ease...soon, I might like PicMonkey better than I did Picnik! :)

What online editing program do you use? If you try PicMonkey, let me know how you liked it!

note:: I don't get anything out of writing this post; it's just my thoughts on PicMonkey for your information! :)

footprints in the sand