I Heart Faces-Kids-Creative Cropping

I Heart Faces is looking for "creatively cropped" pictures this week. Here's how they put it:

For this challenge, we view "creative cropping" in two ways:

1) You can creatively crop your shot in the camera while you are taking the photo (maybe only shoot half the face or way off to one side) or

2) You can take a photo that badly needed some cropping and crop it down in a creative way.

Mainly, you just have to make sure the face is still very much a visible part of your photo.

Here's the super-fun part! Typically, we only allow each participant to have one photo per category in their post (one for Kids and one for Adults.) During this special week we are going to let everyone post their "before" photo along with the creatively cropped photo. (So, if you'd like, you can post the original Kids photo and then that same photo creatively cropped and/or the original Adults photo and that same photo creatively cropped.) We think it will be fun to see how the photo changed just from a creative cropping job!


I've been drooling for weeks over all of the beautifully edited photos in the I Heart Faces contests. I've been using just the basics in my Dell photo software, which really IS basic. I started researching to see what editing program I might like to get. And then, I remembered that I'd bought software a couple of years ago to make a slideshow for my preschool class. Turns out that it's also a digital photo-editing program that I could have been using all along! Duh. It's Microsoft's Digital Image Suite, and while it doesn't hold a candle to PhotoShop or PaintShop Pro, it's still a lot better than what I've been using. So, I took this photo:




and used the crop, filters, and edge functions, and came up with this:




While I may not "win" the contest, I feel like I just might be the biggest winner of all. I've discovered an editing program that I didn't even know I had, and I'm going to have a LOT of fun with it! Not to mention all of the wonderful tips provided by contributors to the contest. For more great pictures and advice, head over to I Heart Faces (right after you leave a comment here!). Make sure to leave some love at the other sites you visit, too! One more thing... through today's contest, I learned that in some cases, less really IS more!