My Secret Weapons
August 27th, 2008 @ 3:58 pm by Miss Pomegranate
An organized bride certainly needs her share of secret weapons - and there is certainly no shortage of bridal armory available via many outlets. I wanted to share with you the key pieces that I have been using over the past year to help keep things in check. Some are software programs and some are of the paper variety, as I prefer to use a blend of the old and new when it comes to organization. I could probably do a solo post on each of these items - but it’s really the combination of them that makes them so awesome.
iDo Wedding Software
http://www.elmsoftware.com
I purchased this software within 2 months of our engagement and haven’t really looked back. When choosing a piece of software, I was looking for ease of use, portability and cost effectiveness - this had it all. Honestly, I haven’t found an online wedding planning tool that is as comprehensive - and I’ve tried them all: The Knot, WedShare, Martha’s Wedding Planning Tools, My Wedding Hero, and Wedding Wire (there’s more - but I won’t list them all). I prefer iDo out of all of them - I just wish it were on the web.
Image via Elm Software
So clean, so Web 2.0 - I love it!
Photoshopping Made Easy
August 2nd, 2008 @ 6:29 pm by Mrs. Flamingo
Being a designer, I need to work with Photoshop sometimes. I’m no pro, but I thought I could try my hand at color correcting pictures. When we hired our wedding photographer, I didn’t want him to do any color corrections because I figured I could do it myself (and save extra $$$ at the same time). Little did I know it isn’t as easy as it seems.
At the beginning of the week, Mrs. Lemon introduced me to Totally Rad Photoshop Actions. Actions are recorded steps you can use in Photoshop. You can use these actions to improve/color correct your photos. They are extremely easy to use, all you have to do is click the “play” button.
Here is a picture from our after wedding photo shoot that I absolutely love. I attempted to edit it, using one of their sample actions called “super fun happy”:
Before:
I’m Not a Professional Photographer; I Just Play One on Flickr.
May 23rd, 2008 @ 12:17 pm by Mrs. Lovebug
Sitting around waiting for our professional pictures to arrive (we get them tomorrow!), I’ve had plenty of time to get my Flickr account nice and tidy. In doing so, I’ve discovered the wonderland that is Picnik, Flickr’s photo editing tool. And oh, what a wonderland it is. If Flickr is my crack addiction, Picnik is my own personal meth lab.
Scenario 1: Say you’re like me, and you’ve got a load of crappy pictures taking up your hard drive. But they’re not so crappy that you want to dump them - maybe they’re all you’ve got from some important event, or they’re the only shots you have of that one night your girlfriend Prudence reaaaallly cut loose.
Scenario 2: You’ve been inundated with all the mediocre photos your friends and family took at your wedding. (Don’t feel bad for thinking they’re mediocre. After all, everyone takes mediocre pictures sometime.) Or you have wedding planning photos you can’t bear to part with, in spite of the fact that you have eight trillion professional pics as well.
How to Plan a Wedding… Google-Style
May 12th, 2008 @ 4:50 pm by Mrs. Canary
Mr. Canary finds some sick sadistic pleasure in reminding me how many months, weeks, and days we have left until the wedding because he likes to watch my face drop and contort with horror when I think I have so much more to do, and I’ve only got X number of days to do it. Here’s where it gets all better… Mr. Canary was a Gmail convert eons ago. I only started using it when we began making wedding plans… and now the benefits are totally evident.
First, I’m sure everyone who reads blogs or blogs themselves is already a big fan of Google Reader. I am! Unfortunately, with all that’s been going on, my reader is backlogged with 1,000+ items. Scary, huh? It’ll make for good reading after the wedding. 
If you don’t use Google Reader and read lots of blogs, you should check it out. Before Google Reader, I used to bookmark all my favorite blogs and then go back and check every day for updates. This is by far much more efficient, especially if you get all geeked out like me and meticulously add tags to each blog you subscribe to.
Read more…
Fun Boards With Polyvore
April 14th, 2008 @ 3:32 pm by Mrs. Flamingo
I’m an inspiration board junkie and if I could, I would make them all the time. Unfortunately free time isn’t my friend at the moment, but luckily thanks to Junebug Weddings and Absolutely Beautiful Things, I found the solution to my problem.
Polyvore is a web-based application that allows you to take images from online stores and drag and drop them into a collage. It’s now my new friend. Can you imagine the possibilities?
Introducing Adobe Photoshop Express
March 29th, 2008 @ 6:13 pm by Mrs. Bee
Adobe Photoshop has just introduced Photoshop Express, a free web-based version (nothing to download) of Photoshop that includes some of Photoshop’s most used features. They also offer 2 gb of free online photo storage so you can upload, organize, and share pictures, and even create slideshows.
Adobe Photoshop is a very powerful but expensive program, so this is an excellent alternative for photo editing software. Once I’ve played around with the program a bit, I’ll write a full review.
If you’ve given Photoshop Express a try, please let us know what you think about it! 
Free Software, Part 2
October 7th, 2007 @ 12:31 pm by Ms. Dahlia
I would like to share with you another open source program that I really like: OpenOffice. Like Microsoft Office, only free. In addition to word processing, spreadsheet and database features, the OpenOffice suite also has a really nifty (but basic) design program: OpenOffice Draw. Overnight Prints recommends Draw as one of the programs in which to design postcards. Since we will be printing our invites through them, I thought I’d try it out.
Here’s what OpenOffice looks like when you first open the program:
Free Software, Part 1
October 4th, 2007 @ 5:50 pm by Ms. Dahlia
There is a tremendous amount of open source software available on the internet. Open source is free! Which means if you are looking at dabbling in designing invitations or placecards and don’t have InDesign or Adobe Illustrator (or want to splurge on it), you can download a similar program at no cost to you.
Today, I bring to you a design program I have worked with: Scribus. Now, documentation for the program isn’t fabulous, but there are plenty of good tutorials available on the web. I’m definitely not the most design savvy individual, but I’ve been able to figure out some of the very basics of the Scribus without too much trouble. And the benefit is that it is easy to do layouts, when compared to using Microsoft Word.
Here are some screenshots.
