Why do I love Picmonkey? Because it's awesome 🙂
Picmonkey is a great image creating tool. They offer a free version, or for a small monthly fee, a full service deal.
Let me demonstrate how I used Picmonkey to quickly make the promo image for my current sale.
First, open picmonkey.com and click edit. This is the paid version, which is only around 5.00 a month, so if you make a lot of promotional images, or even book covers, it's well worth the money. I don't remember what the free version offers, tut mir leid.
Open the image you want to work on. Since I'm building an image, I opened a white template sized for facebook images. You can see on the menu on the left all the options you have in basic edits, including cropping and resizing. I used canvas color to change the background to gray, (see next).
Next I clicked overlays, which is the butterfly icon on the left. You'll be given the option to chose one of theirs, or one of your own. In this case, I chose my own and opened the images of my books on an ereader. (I made those images using picmonkey too.)
After resizing and centering my images (easy click and drag), I added the text. Again you have the option to use one of their fonts or one of your own. The guide box you see on the right opens to give you options for color, size, etc.
I wanted to highlight the text with overlays of arrows and stars. Just click the image you want, stretch or shrink, rotate and choose color, drag to where you want it.
I changed the canvas color to white/gray and added a frame. The red arrow points to a combine feature to flatten your image. You can go back and forth with the little arrows in the tool bar if you want to change something. Finally, you can save you image to your computer.
I never used a filter on this promo image, but there are plenty to chose from. Mix and match and find an effect that's right for you!
The FINAL IMAGE!
If you're interested in the sale, just click it! 🙂
There is a downside to Picmonkey – there is no save files feature in the program. Once you close the website, you can't reopen the image to make changes. If you feel you must change something after this point, you have to start over from the beginning.
I hope you found this tip helpful. Please feel free to leave a comment or question.