Some Lagniappe for You
By Tiny Ruisch
la·gniappe (lnyp, ln-yp)
n. Chiefly Southern Louisiana & Mississippi
1. A small gift presented by a store owner to a customer with the customer’s purchase.
2. An extra or unexpected gift or benefit. Also called regionally boot.
Usually, when I take photographs, my procedure is to take about twenty of them at a time. I figure that I should get one good picture out of that many. On those rare occasions that I don’t get a keeper, I just edit it like it was a shark jumping at a helicopter. The program that I use most often for editing is Paint.NET, an open-source, free photo editing software program. It was originally created as a student project in 2004, funded by Microsoft. It was designed to replace Microsoft Paint, which was included in Windows.
Paint.NET has many advanced features which include blurring, sharpening, the Magic Wand which allows for the selecting of regions of similar color and the Clone Stamp which is used for copying or erasing portions of an image.
Layers are another great feature of Paint.Net. They allow you to add a layer on top of the background that not only allows you to add new items on top of others, but to edit them independently of the other layers.
The program has a large number of special effects. These allow you to alter the appearance of your image. You can use blurs, sepia toning, color level altering, ink sketch transformations, anti red-eye, distortions such as bulging, denting and pixelation. The software has a huge following of users that are constantly creating and sharing other special effects and plug-ins.
Another great feature is unlimited undo history. You can make as many changes as want. If they don’t look good, just undo and do over as often as you like.
There is also an active online community and forum. They will give you any extra help that you might need. You can also find several tutorials and guides.
Did I mention Paint.NETs best feature is the cost? The price is free, although the author will accept any donations. Give it a try. You might like it. You can download Paint.NET here.
If you like the program, just tell everyone that you’ve got a SWLAPCUG extra, bonus perk; a little lagniappe.