3 Ways to Have Fun With Photos

Ok, being sick this weekend has ben a joy. But one good thing to come of it, I’ve been going through my pinned posts from Bloglines and cleaning things up a bit. During one brief period of consciousnous early this morning I came back across the following sites that let you play around with photos.

wanokoto - this Japanese site (with a bit of off kilter English translation) takes your photo and ages it to look like it was taken back in the 40’s or something. The interface is bout as simple as you can get, you browse for a local file or plug in the url of a picture that’s already online and click the “convert” button. Here I took a panoramic shot of the Capital from my recent DC trip, and here’s how it turned out. To save the converted photo you need to right-click and save the image.

Next is Kyolo - here you upload a picture and you can add speech or thought bubbles to the photo. Only option here is to upload a local photo, no grabbing from a URL. Once you do that, you get a default speech bubble, and there’s a text box to type in your text. You have the option to change the shape (from speech to thought to just a simple bubble), rotate which way the thought/speech tail is coming off the bubble, change font size, or just delete the bubble. You can also add additional bubbles, and resize them to fit your text. After you get it just the way you want, just click SAVE and it gives you the final photo with an option to email it to friends and family.

You can sign up for an account with Kyolo and store all the bubbled pics that you do, but either way they seem to get saved in their central server. They even give you easy code snippets for plugging your new bubbled pic into forums and such.

And finally, we have befunky, where you can cartoonize photos. Their flash based app lets you grab a photo from your computer, a URL, or you can snap a shot from your webcam. Once you’ve loaded a pic, you can do some cropping and other basic editing before you get to the cartoonizing. Step 1 involves the sketching. There are sliders to control the amount of detail and amount of brightness you want. Play with them a bit till you get a basic look that you like.

Then you get to play with the color adjustment… and there is also a warp brush, which personally I don’t see using, but hey it’s there if you want it. Finally there’s a Goodies tab that lets you do stuff like add frames, shapes, hair and lips to your cartoonized photo - as well as text and various fashion accessories.

Once you have cartoonized to your hearts delight, you have multiple options for saving. You can register and have your own befunky gallery, there’s code for direct linking into various social networks, you can email it to a friend, save it to your desktop and even order products using your newly cartoonized image (which is likely how they fund the site).

And like kyolo up there, they have to put their url on the finished product for me when I saved it to my computer.

So there ya go… now that you know about them, I am sure you will find TONS of uses for these three sites… right?