A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Do you have a picture that you’d like to add to your website or Facebook page?  Is it a great picture?  Maybe it’s good but needs a little work?

Microsoft Office Picture Manager allows you to quickly crop, compress and resize photos. It comes with all Microsoft Office Suites.  If you don’t have Microsoft Office installed on your computer you can find a free program on-line that will suit your needs.  Both GIMP and Picasa can be downloaded for free and have many photo editing options.     If you would prefer not to download a program from the internet there are also free on-line photo editing programs available such as Pixlr and PicMonkey.  On-line photo storage sites such as Flickr and Photobucket usually have editing capabilities as well.

Experienced users will probably fare well with Pixlr while novices may want to start out with PicMonkey. 
Below is a screen shot of PicMonkey with a photo uploaded ready for editing.  As you can see the blossoms are not centered in the photo and there is some distracting plant material in the upper right hand corner.

Clicking on the crop button opens a few options.  Notice the cropping pane that also opens on the photo.

It’s simple to place the cursor on the pane and move it until it is centered over the part of the photo you would like to keep.  Pull on the outer frame of the cropping pane to make it larger or push in to shrink it.  When you’re satisfied that the size is right and that everything you want in the final photo shows within the cropping pane, click on the apply button.  

Now you have a picture that shows your customers only what you want them to see.

If you don’t want to write a paragraph to go with the picture a few more keystrokes may tell the story for you.

In a few minutes you have a picture to share with your customers that will tell the story you want.