Donation from Aurora: YooHoo & Friends Valentine’s Day and Easter Pals #giveaway

February 8, 2010 by Momstart 124 Comments

Aurora sent me a donation to send off to the charity of my choice and one to giveaway on my blog. They sent the YooHoo & Friends raccoon and fox.

Kids of all ages, young an old will enjoy the five and eight inch YooHoo & Friends characters. My son, especially loves the cute little sounds they make when you push on their little tummies. I had to snatch it right back out of his hands before he decided that it was his new toy. He sister already understood it was a donation so she was yelling at her brother, “It’s a donation bubbie”.

The 2010 introductions include the brand new 24-inch original YooHoo & Friends in pink and blue (MSRP: $109.99), which are great for rounding out retail displays. A birthday assortment includes two styles and each plays the song “Happy Birthday” when squeezed (5”, MSRP $7.99).

Aurora is another company that also includes a free, interactive Web site www.yoohoofriends.com with the purchase of one of the YooHoo & Friends plush animals. Actually, it doesn’t even require an activiation code. I encourage you to learn more about the YooHoo & Friends’ endangered animals.

“Fans everywhere write to tell us that the Web site makes learning about creatures in their natural habitats fun and entertaining for their children.”

When on the site, you can play games, download wallpapers, calendars and icons, watch previews for the upcoming YooHoo & Friends animations and adopt and raise YooHoo & Friends. The YooHoo & Friends are forest creatures and their story is set in a forest called Yootopia, which features the “Tree of Life.” Your kids can join YooHoo & Friends on magical journeys that teach them to value friendship, harmony, honesty and courage. Which are life lessons we all need to learn and practice.

For Valentines:

YooHoo Greetings” which combines the two most popular selling Valentine’s Day items – a plush toy and greeting card. Showing its soft side, Aurora’s “I Wuv U” Bears and “U Make Me Wild” Monkeys are sure to tug at the heartstrings of your special someone. Pearls Before Swine’s cheeky Valentine editions, based on the world famous comic strip, round out Aurora’s product highlights for its Valentine’s catalog.

Welcoming Spring and Easter, YooHoo & Friends are available in six styles sporting bunny ears (5”, MSRP $6.99). The graduation themed YooHoo & Friends are available in yellow, pink and blue; each makes a sound, holds a ribbon scroll and dons a graduation cap that reads, “Big Dreams” (5”, MSRP $6.99).

The YooHoo & Friends line also includes four “WannaBes” featuring YooHoo & Friends dressed as other popular animals – pig, bear, frog and panda. The Springtime WannaBes are available in three styles as either a pink or purple bunny or duck. WannaBes have removable hoodies (5” with sound, MSRP $8.99), and retailers will appreciate 12-piece display box for impulse buys. “YooHoo WannaBes encourage kids to play, pretend and exercise their imaginations, which is reinforced as they head over to the virtual world of yoohoofriends.com,” Kessler says.

For Easter:

For Easter, Aurora’s bestselling YooHoo & Friends, one of the world’s most popular selling plush lines, is available in six styles and welcome Spring sporting bunny ears (5” with sound, MSRP $6.99). The cute and creative mischief-making YooHoo & Friends WannaBes are available in three styles as either a pink or purple bunny or duck. Each features bright colors with removable hoodies (5” with sound, MSRP $8.99). Retailers will appreciate YooHoo & Friends being sold as part of the 12-piece display box.

There are four new styles joining the Dreamy Eyes line whose cast of characters already includes Bashful the Rabbit, Loveable the Lamb and Dewie the Duck (10”, MSRP $11.99). New for Easter 2010 are the five-inch bee, butterfly and frog – each makes a funny sound when squeezed (MSRP $6.49).

To Enter:

Visit YooHoo and Friends and tell me what animal is your favorite?

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The contest will run until Feb 22 nd 11:59 pm Pacific. The winner will be selected by www.random.org. All rules can be found under giveaway rules.

Aurora sent two plush, one for donation and the other for me to send to the giveaway winner.

Aurora – photo editing software giveaway

April 23, 2009 by MomStart 216 Comments

*    Aurora is powered by a sophisticated algorithm that suggests the improvements you see in the pop-up image selector. It’s as easy as clicking on the improved image you like best.

*    The unique Relight feature is like turning on a light bulb inside your photograph. Aurora can detect where your photograph needs more light, and where it doesn’t, and it will naturally relight your image. (You can see in the attached before-and-after image that shows how you can transform an image where half of someone’s face is in a shadow).

*    When you save your edited image, you are NOT saving over the original. Aurora is non-destructive. It will save your edited file with the same name as the original plus an “_au” at the end of the file name so you know which is the edited version. This is a nice feature so that you can keep your originals for future editing (or other needs).

*    Log in to Flickr, Facebook, SmugMug or other social media accounts from within Aurora. That will sync Aurora to your social media account and then enable you to edit photos you have on Flickr in Aurora, automatically updating the version on Flickr. Pretty cool!

There was a very positive review on Imaging Resource which is a website for amateur photographers.

"Aurora is the answer for intuitive photo editing," said Tracey Clark, photographer (www.traceyclark.com), mom and founder of ShutterSisters.com. "I love its unique way of presenting editing options. In my experience using the software, Aurora makes it easy for anyone to improve and beautifully enhance their images."

About Light Crafts, Inc.

Light Crafts, Inc. is a company that believes everyone’s photos should look great and that getting them to look that way should be simple. Light Crafts’ patent-pending image processing technology powers Aurora, the powerfully simple photo editing, organizing and sharing software, and the award-winning LightZone(TM) digital image editing application suite. Light Crafts was founded in 2004 by Fabio Riccardi. The company is privately-funded and based in Palo Alto, California. For more information about Light Crafts and Aurora, please visit www.lightcrafts.com.

My Opinion on Aurora

The software is made by Light Crafts downloaded and stalled with no problems. Then when I opened it it took a long time before I could do anything. I know it was because it actually indexed all of my photos and we have tons, we’ve been completely digital since the birth of my daughter and take 1,000s of pictures.

I was a bit impatient and tried to do some editing before it was done and it crashed on me. However, when I opened it again it worked just fine. This software is not something that I would purchase and that’s because we already own Photoshop.

However, I like it and will recommend it because it is cheaper than Photoshop and it indexes your photos(organizes), you can easily add comments and tags to your photos. You can edit the photos and it doesn’t copy over your original photo. I am happy to have a copy of it now.

It has limitations in what it does, you can’t add graphics or make it look like Kim Anderson art. You can just make adjustments, sepia, black and white and the aurora setting is pretty cool. The enhancements are much better than what you can do with the on-line places.

Best of all is automatically uploading the photos from within the program.

Aurora’s powerfully simple solution not only edits
photos, but it has sophisticated tools to help organize
photos; online back-up services to help keep photos
safe; and Aurora makes sharing photos easy with photo
publishing tools and photo sharing capabilities with
sites like Flickr and Facebook.
Aurora believes that everyone’s photos should look
great, and that getting them to look that way should be
simple.
Aurora is available to download & buy online for
$19.95
Original

Win it:

I have ten copies to give away. Visit Lights Crafts and tell me what you learn on the site.

Extra Entries

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Leave a comment for every entry and the giveaway ends May 14th