It was while ago now that we first talked to you about a new feature we were planning on starting called I Heart My Edit. But today we are here with the first ever I Heart My Edit; a feature which we hope will see some of our lovely readers getting involved and showing off what they can do.

So what is I Heart My Edit? It is basically a chance to learn about how people have managed to achieve certain affects with their photo editing. We are providing an original photograph and then asking people to edit it however they would like and simply let us know what they did.

This week, it’s our first time. So the I Heart Snapping team are editing this time. But next time it could be you. We were really impressed with all the people offering to take part when we first mentioned I Heart My Edit, rest assured your details are all safely in a spreadsheet and we WILL be getting in contact.

So without further ado, there is the first I Heart My Edit…

Original Image

A daisy photo taken on a Nikon D5000 with an 18-55 lens with macro filter.

Katie’s Edit

I basically used idarkroom app and added the cross process filter.  This made it really green so I wanted to dull it down a little.  I used the Photoshop Express App to slightly adjust the contrast (to make it look more dream like).  Finally I added a white border to bring out the vibrant colour of the petals.

Lucy’s Edit

I used Camera+ first of all to crop the image so that it obeyed the rule of thirds a bit more, and I applied the clarity scene filter. I then used BeFunky to edit it further, by using the vibrance filter and I added the grunge1 border to it to frame it and finish it off.

We both went for phone apps to edit with, just to prove that you don’t need fancy expensive editing software to make your images look lovely.

If you haven’t already been in touch with us and you want to be involved, then let us know.

I often get people asking how to add text to photos.  Well today we are going to let you into a little secret and that secret is the Labelbox app.

Labelbox is perhaps the most simple app in the world to use and you can create some really great looking text for your photo captions.

It really is as easy as that.  Swipe the tape across the screen to place it where you want, type the text and voila….a really easy way of putting funky text on to photos.  Here is us playing around to give you some examples of the labels you can use.

Best of all?  Labelbox is completely free.  You get eleven free labels with the free version but if you want any of the others you will have to pay for it.  However there is a wide range with the free version as shown above.

We would definitely recommend Labelbox as a quick and easy way to write on your photos.  As always if you use it on any of your blog posts let us know and we will RT your link.

I stumbled across this app a while ago, and while I was secretly tempted to keep too myself, it is too good not to share!

Meet Cinemagram- quite possibly my most favourite app I have downloaded in a while.

If you follow my personal blog Mummy Daddy and Me makes Three you will know that I am a big fan of GIFs- moving images that can spice up your blog posts.  I use Photoshop to make my GIFS but they can be complicated to do if you don’t know how, and also we are aware not everyone can afford the hefty price tag for Adobe Creative Suite- I am lucky I have a designer husband!

However you can make great little GIFS for your blog using Cinemagram.

Here are some examples of some of my Cinemagram’s.

We are absolutely loving writing I Heart Snapping for you guys. We hope you’re finding the tutorials useful, the reviews helpful and that you are generally feeling inspired to take better pictures and to make your blogs more brilliant and more gorgeous than they already were.

But now it’s your turn. We are looking for some of our lovely readers to get involved with a new Monday feature. This will be your chance to feature your skills on the pages of I Heart Snapping and show off what you can do.

Each week three different bloggers who decide to join in, will be emailed a photograph. This photograph could be of anything, but it will be unedited. The challenge for those three bloggers is to edit the photo, anyway they like, using whatever software or apps that they like. Then email back the finished article explaining how they did what they did. Every Monday we will share the original image and then the three different takes on it and how they were achieved.

You don’t need to be a photo editing whizz to take part. In fact we’d love to showcase all sorts of different people’s styles and ideas. And don’t feel like you would have to do something completely amazing and outstanding and complex. We want instructions that other people can follow, so that our readers can learn from you.

Next week your I Heart Snapping team will be doing the first ever I Heart My Edit so that we can hopefully give you an idea of what we’re after. So if you want to wait and see what it’s all about, then check back on Monday for the post.

If you would like to be involved then let us know and we’ll be in touch. You can simply leave a comment on this post and we’ll use the email address you leave to get in contact. You can DM us via twitter letting us know your email address. Or you can let us know via our Facebook page (which is very new and feeling a bit lonely so come across and like us!)

Carrying on with our series of iphoneography apps that we just love, the next on our list is Pixl-o-Matic.  Made by the people behind the photo editing app Pixlr (more on that in another post) Pixl-o-Matic is a little gem that makes your iPhone photos great.  You can even use the app online as well, making it a hugely versatile package whatever your photo editing requirements.

The main thing to mention about Pixl-o-Matic is the filters.  There is a huge range to choose from, here are some of our favourites…

These are just from the free version, if you want to pay 69p you get lots more choice.

There is also a really large selection of light effects, they really can add a different dimension to your photos.  Here are just some of them.

There is also a large selection of frames, which again are useful if you like using them for your posts.  Like other app’s there is a random button you can press which does some really different edits that you might not necessarily think of yourself.

Pixlr-o-matic is in my top five app’s that I use for iPhoneography so it is well worth a look- the free one is amazing so I am sure that the paid one is even better and at only 69p it is so much cheaper than most of the other photography app’s out there. I think my favourite part of the app is the fact that there is such a large range of light effects and filters- there are some that are really different than the other app’s out there.

I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for an app that does a huge amount of filters and effects- it doesn’t have the functions like crop or basic editing- but I don’t think that lets it down as the app’s main selling point is the wide range of effects- and it does that side really well.

The next free photo editing tool we want to tell you about is Be Funky.  For those of you who haven’t heard of it, this editor comes both as an app and also as a free online editor too.  I think both tools are good, but the online editor ever so slightly gets my vote.

Like most of the other editors we have discussed, Be Funky is really easy to use.  In fact in my opinion, it could be the easiest.  What you see is what you get, and what you get is rather nice as well.

This is just a really quick overview of what Be Funky can do, but no doubt we will explain more about it over the coming months.  I really like the software- it is very clean and easy to use, and does have a lot of really artistic filters and effects.  There are other things that you can do, like add speech bubbles or clipart which I personally wouldn’t use, but they would be very useful for some.  If you like adding filters to your photos it is definitely worth a look as it has some really great ones and I love the fact that you can choose to paint only parts of the picture with the effect- it makes for some really interesting and varied photos.

I could play for hours on Be Funky, so if you like photo effects then I would definitely head over to their site and take a look.

Next on our iphoneography must have list is the fabulous app PictureShow.  

PictureShow is very similar to the typical photo editing apps, but like all the others it has it’s little tricks and functions that mean it is well worth a look.  What I love doing is combining all the different apps to make a really great photo- yes it takes some time but the end results are usually worth it.

There are 5 camera lens which are good fun- including Quad, Vertical Quad and Halfshot.    There are also 45 Styles as well, and they all add a really different dimension to your photos.

Here is our quick guide to PictureShow below.

As mentioned above if you click the big red button on the top right of the screen it allows you to randomly add effects to your photo- it is really good fun and makes your photos look great.  By clicking on the heart on the left it will save it as your own combination if you like it for further pics.

 However the best part about PictureShow I think is the fact that you can access all the styles by clicking the words on the middle at the top.

Overall, I really like PictureShow.  It has lots of different effects and once you get used to it is quite easy to use.  It is up there in the top 5 photo app’s I use and I would recommend it to people who love photo editing.  The app does cost £1.49 but in my opinion it is definitely  worth the money.

Remember a couple of weeks ago we started a little series called ‘Taking Better Photographs’? We talked about the basics of composing a shot; move for a different angle, look at the whole picture, fill the frame. Well this week we’re still talking composition, we’re still on the arty bit of photography before going on to the technical stuff in a few weeks. We’re all breaking in to this business really gently.

So for this week we’re going to be talking about a little trick, and a well known technique among anyone who has ever been on any sort of photography course, called the Rule of Thirds. It works on the principle of you lining up your pictures to a sort of grid which makes your photographs more visually appealing. I’m not personally a fan of the word “rule” because I think there are so many pictures out there which completely ignore this rule and are still appealing and dynamic, but it is a fun technique to play around with; both when you’re taking your photo and when editing it.

The basics are that you envisage your picture as being on a grid. The grid breaks up your picture into three sections both horizontally and vertically. You can then use this grid in a few different ways. I’ve used some examples below of photographs I have taken using the Rule of Thirds and pin pointed how it can help you to take effective and attractive shots.

You can place items of interest at the intersections of the lines. These spots are apparently where your eyes are drawn first when you look at a photograph, so it makes sense to consider that as you take or edit your photos.

The other thing you can do is line up any horizontal or vertical lines in your picture with the lines on the grid. This works particularly effectively with landscape photographs of scenery or if you are photographing people in front of some sort of landmark or view.

You can of course play around with this grid and use it to get some arty and interesting shots of your own. For example you might place the focus of your photo in just one third of the image. Like I said at the beginning; learn the rule, play with it and see what happens. Then feel free to break it.

One of the easiest ways to start getting your brain ‘switched on’ to this way of taking photographs is to edit some old ones. You can make an old photo obey the Rule of Thirds simply by identifying the focus and then cropping the photograph. Once you get use to seeing potential pictures in this way, they you can almost see the grid as you look through your viewfinder and will line things up accordingly.

If you are anything like myself and Lucy- you love taking photos.  And you love putting them on your blog.  After all blogs are the perfect space to show off the lovely photos you have taken.

Sometimes just adding lots of photos on your blog can look a little dull and it is nice to make the layout look slightly different by putting them in a collage.  I love laying out my photos in different ways, and there are lots of packages out there which will help you.  I use Photoshop for mine, but only because I am lucky enough to have a designer as a husband who can afford to pay the extortionate price tag.  There is free software out there which can help you instantly make your blog photos look fantastic and we are going to let you into a little secret about one today.

That software is piZap.

If you haven’t heard of piZap before, I suggest you head straight over there now and bookmark it instantly.  It is basically just another free online photo editor.  It may not look as pretty as Picnik (RIP) or Pic Monkey but it does have some nifty features.  Mainly the collage section.

See the above screenshot?  That is just some of the collages you can do on Pizap.  There really are hundreds of combinations.

It is so straight forward to use that anyone can get to grips with it really easily and if you hover your mouse over any icons that you don’t understand it will explain what they are.  For example in the bottom left hand corner you can adjust the colour and opacity.

Here is an example of a collage made from some 366 photos on my computer.

All in all it took me about 2 minutes to create.  It really is that simple.  There is sure to be a collage design on there to suit everyone.

There are lots of other quirky little bits on there such as web cam effects, clip art and text that you can add to your photos, and backgrounds and borders but some of them are a little tacky and I don’t know how often you would use them.  It does have the usual editing functions like crop and rotate which come in handy.

Overall there are a lot of functions on the software that I wouldn’t use, mainly for the fact that they don’t appeal to me, but Pizap has to get a mention purely for the vast variety of collages that it has on offer.  Perhaps if you know how to make collages from scratch this software wouldn’t really suit you, but if you are a beginner who wants a way of displaying lots of photos on your blog in a quick and easy way then PiZap is definitely worth a look.  Sometimes in blogging you want to write a blog post or publish some photos, but don’t have a lot of time- piZap is excellent for that kind of thing.  I love the fact that there are so many different styles, it really will bring a new dimension to the way in which you display photos on your blog.

There are lots of photo editors out there, each good in their own way and it is great to use a combination of a few of them to really make your photos stand out. Over the next few weeks we will be mentioning our favourites, so stick around and hopefully we will be able to give you some tips.  In the meantime do go and check out piZap- it may not be the most pretty photo editor in the world, but if you delve deep enough there really are some good functions on there.

Iphoneography is everywhere at the moment- you can’t visit a web page, blog or social media site without seeing some superbly edited photos.  As promised we are going to show you our favourites- Between us we must have about 60 app’s- some really well known and some not quite so, so hopefully over the coming weeks we will introduce you to some you haven’t used before.

We are starting on a well known one for most.

iDarkroom is in my opinion- rather fantastic.  It is really easy to use and makes photos look really great.  It is very easy to find your way around and there is a huge range of effects including 20 filter effects, 11 paper effects, 13 light leak and bokeh effects, 5 vignette effects, 4 noise effects and 10 frame effects.  It is the second ever photo app I downloaded and now in my top three.

We really recommend it as a really easy, straightforward app for those who want to give their photos a little bit of an extra edge.  Our favourite part is definitely the random editor- it chooses things that you might not necessarily think would go together and makes them look really good.

It is certainly worth a look if you want to take your photo editing to the next level and are bored with the filters that apps like Instagram provide.