Senior Pictures - No Pressure Thanks to PicMonkey!

My oldest daughter will be a senior this fall. For the last few years we have had our eyes on Senior Pictures, thinking about what she wants. When did this phenomenon happen? This is intense - the photos must be beautiful, unique, on location - to name a few!!

That sounds like something best left to professionals until you check out the pricing. The average in Northern Colorado ran 150 for booking fee, an extra 175 for location fee, portfolio (printing) fee of 425. Aye! - and that's before we order prints for family.

My daughter and I made a deal: we would try them ourselves first. If we were not happy we would hire a pro. The first batch was easy breezy! The outside scenery and lighting did most of the work. Looking at them now I may have been a little too excited about the "sun" feature - but the cool thing is I can change that whenever I want.

The second round (the basketball group) were scary horrible. Cranky, what were we thinking, call a photographer, make room in the budget NOW bad. This is where PicMonkey saved the day.

I really almost gave up - then on a whim I uploaded one to www.picmonkey.com. I cropped first, then adjusted the shadows which darkened the ugly sheet we used and turned it into the stylish background we imagined. After adding the spotlight feature I could not believe we had the same picture! Here are some before and afters:

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 I should mention that I pay the 4.99 per month subscription fee at PicMonkey - I am not sure whether some of the editing features I used are part of the subscription. I use PicMonkey all the time but this by far has been my favorite project - and the biggest money saver!