Resources

I decided to put together this page to share with you some of the tools I use in both my business (blogging here, being a photographer and teaching in-person and online) and in my personal life as a busy mom who takes a LOT of photos and wears many hats 🙂

Photo Editing Software

PicMonkey – This is a free, online photo editor with a ton of cool, easy to use features.  Great for creating collages or adding text to images I use program this every single day.  You can also upgrade to their premium version which will unlock even more goodies for you and make your editing experience ad-free.  Here’s a post I wrote about PicMonkey back in 2013.

Adobe Photoshop Elements – Photoshop is the gold standard when it comes to photo editing but I really find that the program has too much for what I personally need.  I find this is the case for most of my students too who just want to tweak and play around with their images, not get bogged down in the nitty gritty of curves, color spaces and all that! That’s why for my more serious editing – heavy retouching, cloning or photo merging – I use Photoshop Elements 12 – photoshop’s baby brother – or more likely sister. It’s about a quarter of the price of the full version of photoshop and much more user friendly.  They update it every year with very little change although they always pull out something enticing to make you “need” an upgrade!

Photo Organization

Adobe Lightroom is now above and beyond my favorite photo workflow tool.  It organizes my images intelligently, makes sorting through shoots a breeze AND has stellar editing capabilities. I can’t tell you how much I love it and what a difference it’s made to daily workflow.  There is definitely a learning curve with it but once you get the hang of it’s interface and tools you’ll wonder how you ever managed before and you’ll feel super smart and organized – and who doesn’t need to feel that?

Photo Books

Eban Sharbaneau’s Ebook on Trick Photography and Special effects is a fun book which will show you how to get really fun photos with your DSLR.