Photo Effects Fun Without Photoshop Knowledge – Part II

By Shari Bonnin, Contributing Editor

Warning! Using these photo effect applications may be highly addictive.

Ok, now that I have your attention… I know that you read my last article on the very cool free photo apps that empower Photoshop-disabled people, like moi, to render basic photos into something you might just want to place on your wall.  In this article I am going to show you even more websites where you simply upload your photo and start playing. You can add one element or more, depending on what you like. If you don’t like what you see, you simply undo it. A lot of the sites allow you to add the amount of each element you want. Don’t be scared. Nothing is permanent. Your original picture remains in your computer and you haven’t ruined or changed anything forever. You are simply making a copy of the original picture and making it different. So here we go…

First is BeFunky where you can turn your photos into cartoons, line drawings and even make them look like an Andy Warhol mosaic painting. Above is an example of how I turned my dog into a cartoon. She’s pretty fun this way, don’t you think? What I like about BeFunky is that it allows you to adjust how much effect you would like to use.

With Big Huge Labs you can also do a Warhol type mosaic (which I think is even better than the befunky.com version) as well as a multitude of other fun photo enhancements. You can also send the completed photos directly to your Flickr or Facebook accounts as you can with many of these other sites.

LunaPic.com has many options for photo effects including animation. In the first example, I used Photo Spread. I uploaded a black and white picture I took of my friend’s cute baby and under “effects” clicked “photo spread” and here he is, in all of his adorable kissable pieces.

Then I took a close up picture of artichokes, added “painted” under effects and “sandstone texture” under effects>texture and now there is a very different and distinguished looking picture of artichokes, a nature morte of artichokes, so to speak.

I found two drawbacks to using Lunapic though they may not affect you at all. The first is that there is no way to adjust the levels of the effects that they give you so if you are wanting less, cartoon, for instance, well, that’s what you’re stuck with. The second issue is that the  largest file you can download is 1000 x 1000. That means you may not be able to print it out with good quality because the dpi is only 100. If you are keeping these photos in your computer and using them in blogs and such, it’s not a big deal.

Picnik.com is one of my favorite websites. I never really appreciated it until I started playing with it. There is a free version and a paid version. I think the free version is just fine for my needs. I have found the one-click effects far superior to other websites. I love to combine 2 to 3 effects. In the barrels, first I gave it a little “HDR” (High Dynamic Range Imaging) to make the barrels pop (adds intensity), then I did “Heat Map” and moved the bars around until I liked the colors I saw. I then added a Vignette border to tie it all together. But that’s not all. Picnik also allows to add things like text. So I clicked on the text tab, found the cool font I wanted and wrote something clever. You can add stickers too.

Onto the big finish. Drum roll please….Now this, to me, is amazing. How about making your environment look like a miniature scene, like something you’d see with a train set or in a doll house? With TiltShiftMaker you can get this look just by changing the focus of the how the lens sees the picture. Usually this effect  is done with special lenses. Now you can do this with one click. Now if only I could make my dogs this small, I could carry them around in my pocket.