Monday, December 03, 2007

A List of Fun Photo Sites

It's always nice when a talented group of programmers decides out of the goodness of their hearts(or maybe the rush of caffeine) to create wonderful free sites that provide hours of photo fun. It's amazing to think that some of the things these sites do for free in seconds, people used to pay for and wait whole minutes to get(you remember "software" right?).

Here are just some of the sites I've come across that let you do things to photos and make the world a better place:

ReflectionMaker.com - "A little tool for all your reflection needs!" is the tagline for this site which allows you to upload any image(or point to an online one) and define the reflection size and background color.

Here I used a photo of myself that was taken while I was watching a Golden Girls marathon. With that reflection at the bottom of my picture I have now created a cool image to update my Facebook profile image, which guarantees all my "friends" will yawn in excitement at my coolness.















Photo2Text.com - With this site you have the opportunity to upload a photo and have it seamlessly turned into ASCII text. Thats right your image will be turned into something only a true geek could love. For those of you who are not computer nerds, ASCII stand for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and your can read all about it here.

So still using the above picture(which may have been taken while I took a brake from writing my book about a man with a phobia of post nasal drip), I ran it through the site and here was the result:

I had to post a screen shot of the "image" that was generated since its a pretty big file and we want you to actually come back to this website after reading these posts and not flee in terror.

The site also lets you choose different character sets, adjust brightness levels, and if you don't want to use letters and numbers there are shades of grey. Now if someone could tell me why one would want to do all this that would be helpful.




Picnik.com - This is a site that is pretty amazing, since its offering some handy photo editing tools all in the browser so there is nothing to download. There are various things that you can use to just touch up a photo like red eye removal, color adjustments, etc. There are also fun things like adding frames, little images and of course text. Even with all these wonderful options the following is what I came up with:

If you need an explanation look here. Or don't and take it at face value that I need to step away from the computer and walk outside.











Dumpr.net - Last but not least is the oddly named Dumpr.net. When I said this name out loud I thought it was relationship advice, but actually its a collection of interesting photo tools in one place. Some of these are pretty bazaar. Take this one for example:

The source picture was the same one as above(I was modeling for my "before" picture for a botox infomercial).

I'm not quite sure what I would use this for, I mean who doesn't want to see their facial features morphed into a nightmarish circular flesh-ball? I think I will make an ornament for this years tree so the kids are guaranteed to stay away from it, as would everyone else.











Here, using the Easter Egg function, I turn into something disturbing. Almost like Vince Vaughn, but not the cool slick version from Swingers, more like this version.















There are plenty of other sites out there to create masterpieces like the above. Tell me about your favorites so I can go in and misuse them.