Review & Giveaway: Aurora

I recently had the chance to try out Aurora, a photo editing, organizing and sharing software.

Aurora helps you make your important photos look even better by allowing you to easily edit them. One of the best parts of Aurora is their "relight" tool, which basically turns on the light inside of the images - and I saw a huge difference in a lot of the pictures I played with. You can also straighten, adjust color strength and warmth, crop, zoom and adjust red-eye (great for those pet photos, especially!)

Aurora also allows you to take photos from your camera or computer, re-arrange and re-name them, then tag and rate favorites for easy viewing and retrieval. You can also pay $4.95 a month for an online back up of all of your photos, which is powered by Amazon.com, and it's very easy to email your finished work to family and friends.

I'm pretty sure that you've noticed I need all the help I can get with some of my photos I post here. ;) lol

Here's a photo I just posted yesterday:


But here is the same photo cleaned up:


There is a BIG difference, even in so simple and boring of a photo, isn't there? Here's another one, featuring the Pudgy Princess:


And after:


Another huge difference, right? I love to take photos, and to be able to correct some of the less than stellar important moments is huge to me. I like knowing the moment isn't necessarily ruined because of my blah-blah photo skills! By the way, your original photo is safe - when you click save on the edited photo, it will automatically add an -au to your image file name (unless you change it yourself) You'll be easily able to choose from the edited vs non-edited version when uploading your pictures anywhere.

Aurora is available for direct download to your computer for $19.99. You can also download a free 7 day trial to see how easy Aurora is.

Win it! The folks behind Aurora are giving FIVE of my lucky readers their photo editing software! (woot!) To enter, tell me if you're the one usually taking the pictures or is it someone else, and what feature you can't wait to try out first.

You know the drill - if you're a subscriber or follower of my blog there's an extra entry for you!

Also if you blog about this giveaway with a link back, there's another entry. Blog about it with a before and after picture using the trial software, and I'll give you 5 more entries!

Digg, stumble, kirsty, twitter this giveaway, and another entry per way for you! (leave your username)

Giveaway ends June 27th at 11:59 PM PST. And guess what - this one's open to my Canadian readers too! (YAY! I hate leaving you guys out!)