I figured it would be easier to use a simple online application in the short term and brush up on Photoshop or Photoshop Elements in the long term. I’m hoping to take some sort of Photoshop class in the near future and am looking forward to a series Ali Edwards has planned for next week on digitial scrapbooking (she mentions the series at the bottom of this post).

I found this site that I’m currently loving … it’s called Picnik. As it says on the homepage of the Web site it’s designed to make photo editing fun – “Picnik makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing tools. Tweak to your heart’s content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes, and frames. It’s fast, easy, and fun.”

The cool part is, it’s free. You can sign up for a paid version of the site, but all of the basic tools and tons of fun goodies are free. I’m testing it out for free right now and will decide if I want to upgrade to the paid version later.

So what can you do on the site? Let me show you. Here is a raw, unedited photo of my sweet baby Cooper. It was taken on a cell phone, so it’s not the very best quality. However, it’s adorable and I’d like to be able to tweak it a little so it could be used for either a scrapbooking page or a blog post.

Here’s the photo after I made some basic fixes to it thanks to Picnik. One of the things I like best about this site is that every time you apply some sort of action (like adjusting the exposure), there is a mini tutorials that pops up on the screen and explains what the action is, why you would make adjustments to it and how you’d make changes.

And now here’s the photo after I add some of the cool effects and features. For this particular example, I applied the “holga-ish” effect and then added the museum matte frame. There are all sorts of free effects and frames you can use. There is a Polaroid frame that makes your photo look like it’s, umm, a Polaroid!  Try it out, it’s tons of fun.

Next up for me … I want to try some of the cool digital items that you can purchase at House of 3. Have you seen Heidi Swapp’s latest endeavor? Her new site, House of 3 offers all sorts of down-loadable goodies that you can either print out and use on a physical scrapbooking page or you can use them digitally. How cool is that?