Cognoscis

Here are ways you can get the best of your photos by tweaking them online:-

Be Funky- By far the best imaging site I have ever come across. Read this to get more info about it. Easy to use and splendid effects.

Photofunia- A great site for digital frames. Be the Superman, or be Johnny Depp in Pirates of Carribean, Be on a huge poster, etc. Read more here.

The Face Transformer- An application developed by St. Andrews University to transform your face into different type. For eg. Manga Cartoon, Old age, Botticelli Painting, etc. read more and in detail about it here. It’s a little tricky to use.

Yearbook Yourself- A site which enables you to create different photos of yourself according to styling of different years from 1950 to 2000. It requires a lot of adjusting to get a perfect image though.

PicArtia- Create a mosaic of your favourite photo with many small photos. Choose a smaller pixel size for good results. But not too small. And do use a BIG image.  No mobile snaps will give you good enough results.

MagMyPic- Get on different magazine covers by creating a fake picture with this application.

Dumpr- Multiple effects like rubik’s cube, celebrity paparazzi, sketch, etc.

Personalized Money- Get your face imprinted on a dollar bill. Fundoo!

Loonapix- Easy to use interface plus LOADS of effects. Get digital frames, swap faces, Trim your photo, or get a Loonapic effects which is just like photofunia and fun photo box.

Pictreat- One step treatment of your photo which includes color fixing, reduction of face-marks, etc. This doesn’t produce major changes but.. worth a shot. I tested them with one of their examples and it worked. I don’t have pimples you see .

FlauntR- Style your pictures, or use their online editing tool just like Adobe Photoshop. or even better, blend famous paintings in your picture. Awesome site.

Do you have picture which you want to fix but you don’t know how? If you have Picasa, you can do it quite easily. You can get it on Picasa.com. So here is a REALLY BAD picture of me. Like VERY BAD. Why did I even keep it for so long? But I am glad now that I did. I opened it in Picasa, and clicked on “Edit in Picasa”.

You can see there are options like auto correct, auto colour, I’m feeling Lucky, which DO work for many pictures but I mentioned that this one is really bad and nothing worked on this. So I cliked on the tuning tab.

Here I see 4 options. Fill Light, Highlights, Shadows, and Color Tmperature. Now I “Filled Light” in my photo. Too much of anything is bad, so don’t overdo it. I filled light a little less than the half mark. Similarly, I adjusted all the four. “Fill Light” and “Color temperature” are the most useful over here. Work to get perfect combination of all four. And the result would be extraordinary. Finally, I cropped it, and it’s now ready to go to my Facebook account .

You can also use effects like Sepia, Black and White, etc. by clicking on the effects tab.  I think it went quite well. Here’s another one I fixed.

Now, here in this post I will tell you about a fabulous website to apply ultra cool effects to your photos. Want to see your photo scribbled or cartoonized? Read on for these and more….

The website is BE FUNKY – Photo effects with one click.

I used one of my favourite photos and used all their effects. The results? Fantastic.

There are 37 different types of effects you can put on your pictures in 9 categories. These are Cartoonize, Warhole, Charcola, Patirotic, Infiky, Line Artopia, Stenciler, Sunburst and Scribbler.

You can save the photos on your desktop or into a gallery. Click on “more options” for adjusting brightness and color detail. You can even rate each effect. Now here are different effects on my phtos. I have uploaded one (the best) from each category. Click on “goodies” for different frames, shapes, appearance, graphic text, speech bubbles, writing text and warping. It also has a “make it real” feature which you can opt for getting your now modified pictures on Cups, T-Shirts, and as Photo Prints.

17 Oct., 2009

I checked out Be Funky again yesterday and it looks like they’re after loads of money now. They have totally updated their site. They have now TOO MANY effects too handle but there are TOO MANY drawbacks as well.

1. Few effects are available only too Premium (paying) users.
2. The effects are so many, that it is difficult to choose from and many are useless.
3. The website has become too slow.
4. The effects are not clearly shown in the picture representing the picture.
5. They now apply a watermark over pictures of free users. In the top left corner, there is a ribbon saying “Created at befunky.com”. One way to fix this is to add some blank extra space at the top of your picture using MS Paint or similar software. However, this may prove to be an obstruction for some effects. But try it out.

So in the end, I would conclude that I liked the old Be Funky better. If it is updated again, please inform me.

Now here is something REALLY interesting. I have worked for days on this one. This is my best post YET.

You see, I found this Face Transformer developed by University of St. Andrews. With this app, you can transform your face into your “Old” self, Manga Cartoon, Botticelli Painting, East Asian self, etc. Now I really like all this stuff. Though I so hate Horoscopes. I mentioned horoscopes because this app can show you your future self. I mean how could it be that all “Leos” in Delhi “are likely to initiate something on the domestic front and will have favourable luck”? OR, how could it be that everyone with sunsign Sagitarrius “will have financial gains” on the same day?

Now returning to our Face Transformer, this thing is fun. First, click or find a picture of your face. It should be straight, symmetric, and should only show your face. Or you will have to zoom it using their tool. Save the trouble. And don’t edit it much with photoshop. Crop if you want to. No problems there.

Having fulfilled these conditions, your photo is now ready to be transformed. Choose picture, fill in the small details. And the process will take you there.

Now transform your photo into different kinds. Note that this is not accurate or the truth. This is just for fun. Don’t be sad if your adult version doesn’t look what you wanted it to be (Here you can guess what happened with me. GOSH! I am really scared with my older me.). Know what? Choose the child version, now did you look like that when you were small? No (like me)! Right? If you did, well…… um….. It’s only a tool…. I guess. Here are my transformations (No comments allowed on those).

The HITCH: Now there’s a very irritating problem with this transformer. It is too imperfect. Some photos will give you good results for some types of effects, some will give for some other types of effects, and most  will not give you any sort of good results. I had to experiment with 5-6 photos (including a photo of Elvis Presley) to obtain the results I have put online. So choose the picture wisely, and you will have to work on it if you want something good to show to your friends.