Start by reading the posting on Picnik from the last Web Challenge: http://oclwebthings09.blogspot.com/2009/11/thing-14-picnik.html
Creating a free account is optional for Picnik but recommended.
By the end of this practice with Picnik, you should be comfortable making simple cropping, rotating/straightening, resizing and color corrections to photos and images. This should make it possible to take images from many different sources and edit them to work with Engaged Patrons, blogs and other purposes. Picnik makes it very easy to post and edit pictures with many services like Facebook as well.
It looks like I’m asking you to do a great deal this month but once you start playing and get used to Picnik, each task won’t take long.
Save a copy of the picture of Princess Ann below to your computer. Notice the stylized turtle in the lower right of the panel.
Crop the picture so all you see is the turtle.
Resize the cropped picture of the turtle so it is suitable in size for Engaged Patrons use.
Save and Post the picture to your blog by September 17, 2010.
In all the saving and posting, did you notice that Picnik tells you the size of the JPEG file you have created and with a sliding bar lets you make the file bigger and smaller?
Upload to Picnik a picture that you could see really needing to edit to put in OCL Connections or Engaged Patrons. Resize and save it and email it to the challenge email address by September 17.
Optional: Play with the picture of the turtle using the free tools under the Create tab. Notice many of the tools are limited to Preminium (paid) users. The most creative turtle wins this month’s chocolate prize (dark, milk or white is winner’s choice). This picture should be emailed as an attachment to the challenge gmail account by September 17 . Posting it to your blog is optional.
Google Images
You can sometimes avoid the whole photo editing process by using the advanced features in Google images. If you find an image that is the right size, color, file type, etc., to begin with you’ll save time and effort.
For more information on some image search features, this Google Blog post http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/search-options-now-on-google-images.html
Google Images Help http://images.google.com/support/?hl=en
Further suggestion
If you look on OceanNet, under Reference, then Workshop and Conference Notes, you'll see Free Graphics Software and Web Tools, notes from a presention in June 2010. It gives you some of the latest options in free web tools for working with graphics. My thanks to Meg R. for her notes on the workshop given by John LeMasney, Manager of Instructional Technology at Rider University.
Here are two of my transformed turtles:
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