As a blogger, photos are quite important. They can often be the difference between a good post and a naff one. My photos aren’t too shabby, but they do often need a bit of tweaking here and there. I’ve played around with Photoshop and Lightroom, but I just can’t get to grips with them. I think for those, you do sometimes need a bit of knowledge around the technical side of photography. I need something that is A) simple to use and B) cheaper!

Fotojet is a web graphic designer, photo editor, and collage maker. It works through your web browser, so you don’t have to install anything (a big plus for me).  There is a basic free subscription or a premium version, which costs $2.91 a month if billed annually, or $4.99 if billed monthly. The basic version allows you to do some basic editing, and use some of the templates, clip art images, overlays etc, and also has ads on. The premium version, which I’ve been using, has access to all of them and is ad-free.

There are three sections to the website:

Photo Editor

This is the section that I use the most. It’s really simple; you upload your photo from your computer or directly from Facebook and get to work using the many tools. You can resize, rotate, edit the exposure and colour and sharpen. I tend to use the auto-enhance, which generally seems to be enough. The top picture is the original, taken on my bridge camera, the bottom one is using the auto enhance. It’s brightened it up a lot!

There are some effects to choose from, including black and white, sepia and Lomo. Within these, there are further effects, and you can change the colouring and intensity. I like to use these on my Instagram feed, so they’re pretty useful. You can also add overlays, such as paint, bursts of light and bokeh. The top photo below is the original photo of Llandudno pier, the bottom one has a light burst added. I think it is quite a nice effect! There’s also an option to add text and frames.

Collage

This is the feature that I’ll probably use the least, but it’s fun to play around with. There are lots of templates to choose from. You upload your photo(s) and use the drag and drop tool to create your collage. Some have clip art and text added to them, which can be removed at the click of a button. I did find the ‘Fotojet’ branding on them all slightly irritating – they can be removed easily but I don’t think they need to be on the Premium version. This is a really quick one I made – all I had to do was upload my three photos to one of the templates:

Design

This is a particularly useful tool for bloggers. It makes it really simple to make images for social media, with perfectly sized templates for Youtube channel headers and thumbnails, Facebook posts and cover photos, Twitter headers and Pinterest, amongst others. You can create your own or use one of the many templates. There’s also a small selection of stock photos. You can use the design section to create flyers, invitations, cards, magazine covers and more. It’s really versatile. Below is a design I created using a Facebook post template. The words and graphics were already there – I just had to swap the stock photo for a picture of my own (and how beautiful is my fur-niece, Carly?!)

Once you’ve finished with your image, whether you’re using the editor, collage maker or designer, you simply download your picture to your computer or share straight from Fotojet to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Tumblr. At the moment, there isn’t a cloud storage option, which I know similar editors do have.

All in all, I think it’s a great tool with some really useful functions. I’m disappointed that there isn’t a mobile app for it – I like to edit my iPhone photos on the go for Instagram, so hopefully that’ something that they will look into developing. It’s really easy to use, perfect for anyone who doesn’t have much experience in photo editing or design and just wants to have a bit of fun with their photos.

If you’re interested in trying Fotojet out for yourself, head over to the Fotojet website. The lovely people at Fotojet have given readers of Coffee, Cake, Kids the chance to win a year’s free subscription to the premium version of the website. To enter, please follow the instructions in the Rafflecopter widget below. Please make sure you take a minute to look at the full terms and conditions at the bottom of the post.

**Please leave the ‘URL’ box BLANK when writing a comment unless you are a blogger or a website owner. You do not need to write N/A, none, Facebook or anything – failure to do this will lead to disqualification from the giveaway**

a Rafflecopter giveaway