Better Pictures with FREE Software

Take a look at the pictures to the right. Look quickly. Don't drool. The young lady is Denise Milani, an internet model who is quickly gaining some fame for obvious reasons. If you are interested, I can tell you that she was born in eastern Europe, now resides in the US and is making her living by having her picture taken. She does not do porn, nor pose nude; though she seems to be doing quite well for herself. If you would like, you can visit her site to learn more. I would think for those working in either a "babe" or "big boob" niche, she would be a natural.
For our purposes, however, I am more interested in the photographs themselves. Take another look. If you can pull your eyes off of the obvious for a moment, you will notice that I have used the same picture twice. The second picture has been altered.
First, I cropped it. After all, chances are good that those who come to your site didn't come to look at the water. They came to look at girls. So give them a look a the girl without all of the background clutter. NOTE: Sometimes the "clutter" is important. For example, if Miss Milani were exposing herself and there were some passers-by in the background, the keeper of a flashing blog might determine to keep that entire shot, since it is specific to his niche. Capiche?
The second thing that I did was lighten the picture just a touch. This is a pretty girl. We don't want her to be lost in the shadows, do we?
I know what some of you are thinking. "Now we have to go buy Photoshop or some other megadollar picture imaging software." Not at all. Remember, our goal is to do this for free. Even though I have some fairly pricey software, there are some great freebies on the net that will allow you to do some pretty fancy photo editing. I would recommend that you start with Picasa. Picasa is now available as a part of an free essential software package provided by Google. Over in the right column of this blog you will see a square that advertises that package. Aside from Picasa, it includes an Antivirus scan from Norton, a Spyware protection package, a new version of Adobe reader, the ultra-cool Google earth (serves no significant purpose, but it is addictive nonetheless) and a few other nice trinkets.
Picasa will let you crop, correct, add special effects, create albums and collages as well as organize all your photos. For a free program it is pretty robust, and will definitely serve the blogger well. So grab the Google Essential Software package and start sharpening up those pictures on your blog.