Easy And Free Photo Editing On Your PC
Written on October 21, 2009 by Kay
Remember when you had to take your film into a photo kiosk and pick it up the next day? Photo instant gratification meant lugging around a cumbersome Polaroid camera. I can still hear that mechanical gasp as it spat out your picture on a flimsy piece of a plastic-like substance. And it wasn’t too long ago when if you wanted to spice up or edit your digital photos, you had to know a little bit of Photoshop, a behemoth application that’s sort of like the Swiss army knife in the photo editing world.
Today, with all the easy-to-use desktop and online photo editing apps floating about, you can essential process and edit your entire digital photo collection without a lot of fuss and technical knowledge. Let’s go through some of the most popular photo editing tools that turn your computer into your own personal darkroom.
Psykopaint
If you have ever wanted to give your photos an artistic touch, give Psykopaint a try. Psykopaint turns your photos into digital canvases, emulating a brush-painted masterpiece. Psykopaint gives you a lot of options for the artist in you to play around with. For example, control the dimensions of your brush strokes, brush overlap frequency, and shadow effects, which gives your brush strokes a 3D feel. Turn all your digital photos into an Impressionist work of art.
Easy Mosaics
Everybody has seen an intricate mosaic—an image where every single pixel (not really a pixel in a bitmap sense, but small units that make up the image’s entirety) is actually another image. This feat would be incredibly time consuming if you were tasked with creating one by hand, but computers are all about speed and processing power, so creating this type of image is easy for a machine with a CPU and RAM.
Creating a mosaic out of your photo collection is easy with a program called Foto-Mosaik-Edda. Point FME to a folder full of images, select a main image to make a mosaic out of, and let the app do the rest. Options include the ability to choose the number of images that make up the finished mosaic and the width and height of it.
FlauntR
Ever dream of one day being on the cover of Time magazine? Snap your dream into a reality with the help of FlauntR, an application that lets you alter your photos with some really cool tricks. Embed your mug into a mock magazine cover and e-mail them to all your friends for a laugh. Incorporate special effects like water ripples, smooth gradients, and hue adjustments. Sure, if you’re a Photoshop whiz, these types of special effects are simple to perform with the help of filters and other editing techniques, but not everybody can take the time to learn such a humongous application. For a small fee, use FlauntR’s printing service for professional prints.
Dumpr
Do you have some time to kill and want to have fun with your photos? Time killing sites abound all over the Internet, websites that serve no particular purpose other than to idle away a few hours. Dumpr is such a website. With Dumpr you can do things like painting your images onto the sides of a Rubik’s cube, alter a photo to simulate the hasty effect of a paparazzi snapshot, smooth the dimensions of a portrait to wrap around an Easter egg, and other weird but fun photo editing gems, all very addictive in their own right. After you’re done pasting your mug all over a Rubik’s cube, e-mail it or post it onto your Facebook account.
