Today has been quite a productive day at the Peppler household! I made homemade bread (great flavor, a little dense), made my own dusting spray and managed to dust most of the main living area, and made an all purpose cleaner for the counters which I really like!!! I plan to discuss homemade cleaners a little more later in the month, but for today, our money saving tip is: Do your own photo editing!!!
Last year, we spent $270 on sitting fees for 3 photo sessions (plus the cost of prints). While we really loved all the photos we received from these sessions, we also noticed that our children are not really themselves during these wonderful little outings. We purchased an SLR camera back in July (since our previous camera somehow ended up floating in Daddy's glass of water), and we decided to start trying to crop and edit some of our own photos. For the holidays, we had 3 more photo sessions with different portions of our families and we were able to create some beautiful Christmas gifts for the cost of the prints alone. We utilize http://www.picnik.com/ to edit our photos. We are considering upgrading for a small fee each year but currently only use the free editing tools. I am sure professionals can tell the difference, but the cost savings is phenomenal. We have also been told to try http://www.gimp.com/ for photo editing but have not done so yet.
So, let's say that the 3 additional photo sessions at Christmastime would have cost us around the same amount as the first 3 sessions last year. We would have paid $540 for only the cost of the sessions (no prints included). This year we are going to try it on our own. While this may take a tad more patience on the part of Mommy and Daddy when trying to get the perfect shot, we also realize the cost savings for us. If we can manage to get 3 year and 2 year photos of Matthew and Ella and maybe a family picture here and there, we will likely save over $500 this year on pictures!
Edited for FREE on Picnik!!!
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