With a few minutes effort and a little know-how you can turn a regular holiday snapshot into a work of art
Have you taken photos on a holiday recently? Or do you have photos of buildings from your favorite city? If so, why not turn your architectural photos into printable art? We’ll show you how to use the photo editing program Paint.net to give a regular photo the look of an expensive piece of wall art. We’ll do this by rotating and cropping it.
If you don’t yet have Paint.net installed then check out Issue 1 for download and installation instructions.
To start, open Paint.net and open the photo you want to work with. The effect works well with a photo that is wider than it is tall and where the subject is in the middle of the photo as in this example.
Choose Layers > Rotate/Zoom and locate the Angle box. Click the up arrow to rotate the photo anti-clockwise. You want the effect look deliberate – so set the rotation angle to somewhere around 20-30 degrees.
Now drag the zoom slider upwards to zoom into the image so the subject fills the screen. If the subject is not in the very center of the photo, locate the Pan box and drag the cross hair cursor to place the subject in the middle. Click OK when you’re done.
If desired, you can finish by further cropping the photo – we cropped ours to a square. To do this, click the Rectangle Select tool and drag over the area of the image you want to keep and choose Image > Crop to Selection. Make sure to save your photo using File > Save As and give it a new name so you don’t overwrite the original photo. If you love this rotated image effect then consider also making the photo black and white by choosing Adjustments > Black and White. Black and white is a sophisticated look and it works particularly well for architectural photos like the one shown here.
