How to guide for a great picture collage on Mother's Day from Cricket

~ Five free photo filter apps and picture collage workflow

News provided by

Cricket Communications, Inc.

May 10, 2013, 12:05 ET

SAN DIEGO, May 10, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- As millions race to capture the perfect gift for Mother's Day, Cricket Wireless offers suggestions for five free photo filter apps and a guide to curate photos to help you celebrate Mom's special day.  The flowers have been ordered and the restaurant reservations are made, so all that remains is sharing artfully crafted images or a photo collage with friends and family wherever they are.

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Five free photo filters that work well with Instagram1:

Sketch Guru is a professional app that will create a virtual sketch of your photos with pencil, crayon, watercolor and other photo filter options. The integration with Facebook and Twitter allows you to easily pull images from and send them to your social sites.

Adobe Photoshop Express gives smartphone photographers intuitive tools to crop, rotate, adjust color, and add artistic effects and then quickly share with family and friends.

Snapseed makes any photograph extraordinary with fun and creative photo filters. Smartphone photographers will appreciate the built-in Google+ capabilities that make it even more powerful to share curated images on Mother's Day.

PicSay takes scrapbooking to the mobile platform and allows photographers to enhance pictures with an easy to use tool-set that includes personalized word balloons, titles, graphics, stickers and moustaches.

Photo Grid is a custom collage maker. Using photos from your photo library, Photo Grid allows smartphone photographers to arrange photos, design custom frames, add titles, and easily share the final masterpiece to your social networks.

Try this workflow2 guide to create a special picture collage for Mom on Mother's Day:

  1. Use Sketch Guru in the 1:1 aspect ratio, flick the green check at the top right of your screen, select ColorPencil, flick the green check, Save to Gallery.
  2. With a different photo, use Snapseed to add a custom filter. Take a photo or open one from your gallery, select Vintage, swipe your finger to the left to increase intensity, flick the check mark at the bottom right of your screen, choose RetroLux, flick the check mark, touch the down arrow at the top center of your screen to save the photo.
  3. Open an image with PicSay, choose the fast option, select Effect, select Spotlight, adjust the Spotlight as desired with the minus and plus slide ruler below, hit the green check at the top right of your screen, choose Sticker, select Hair, add a moustache to your image, select Sticker, choose Word Balloon, add a word message in the text box, tap the green arrow, drag the word balloon to the desired location, select Export, choose Save picture to album.
  4. Open Photo Grid using Grid HD (multiple boxes), choose the images that were created in steps 1, 2 and 3, notice that your image gallery will now have Sketch Guru, Snapseed and PicSay folders- move back and forth between galleries using the < arrow  at the top left corner of your screen, with the three images now at the bottom of your screen, select the green arrow > at the bottom right, choose T icon to add text, type a note in the text box, "Happy Mother's Day," hit the green arrow, position the text message at the top of the image, choose the green down arrow at the top right corner to save your photo, select desired resolution size, choose the three linked dots shaped in a < triangle to share, select desired resolution (for Instagram it's 720 png), find Instagram in your listed social platforms, then share with your friends and family!

Additionally, Cricket recently announced a new Family Plan, offering families added value and options to stay connected. The more lines you add, the more you save. Two no-contract smartphone lines are $40 each when you sign up for automatic bill pay, and each line has its own full speed data allowance so everyone in the family gets their own plan. Now, there is no need to worry about sharing minutes or data, just more time and money to enjoy the things that matter most.

About Cricket

Cricket is the pioneer and leader in delivering innovative value-rich prepaid wireless services with no long-term contracts. Cricket offers nationwide wireless voice and mobile data services over high-quality, all-digital 4G LTE and 3G CDMA wireless networks. Cricket's innovative products and services, including the award-winning Muve Music¨ - the first music service designed for a wireless phone, are available nationwide at Cricket branded retail stores, dealers, national retailers and at www.mycricket.com. For more information about Cricket, please visit www.mycricket.com.

1 All listed apps are linked to Google Play for Android. Please find iOS links from iTunes here: Sketch Guru, Adobe Photoshop Express, Snapseed, Photo Editor- an alternate to PicSay, Photo Grid.

2 These instructions assume you have already downloaded the suggested apps to your smartphone.

SOURCE Cricket Communications, Inc.