More Photo Fun

Back in December I drew attention to bighugelabs.com, a website that allows the user to take a photo of herself and place it within a relatively professional-looking context: a magazine cover, CD cover, Andy Warhol pop-art poster, motivational poster and more.

This week my colleague Rob Geiger has passed on a few more web sites which perform similar magic.  Each has its own strengths - and weaknesses. Here's a run-down.

anymaking.com
This site is clean, well-coded, and easy to use.  The site emphasizes simplicity over a wide range of choice or control.  Users do not have to create an account to use the effects, and while the effects are limited, most are quite good.  Effects include wanted posters, jigsaw puzzles, pencil drawings, and more.  Students at almost any grade level could have fun and success with this site.

loonapix.com
Loonapix offers a wider range of possibilities than anymaking, but at the cost of increased complexity.  Like anymaking, it doesn't require creation of a user account - always a bonus when working with younger students.  The interface can be a bit confusing at times.  For example, after the user has uploaded a photo and selected an effect to apply to it, he must then go on an Easter-egg hunt for the tiny little "create" link at the bottom of the screen.  Having said that, the site provides one hundred different choices for photo effects and at least fifty different punch-out templates for inserting faces into scenes.  Here again, the interface suffers from some inconsistencies: photo effects are listed in one enormous scrolling window, whereas the face punch-outs are listed in categories and then pages within categories.  One small drawback is that some functions only work within Internet Explorer (tilting faces, for example), but, overall, this site provides ample possibilities for students from grades four and up to explore.

services.pho.to
Pho.to's primary purpose is as an online photo enhancement tool.  To this end, it has a number of serious applications including the Makeup Photo tool, which does a remarkable job of touching up portraits to smooth the skin and remove blemishes - sort of like having a professional air-brush artist available at a mouse click -great for those who want to prepare their portraits for magazine covers.  (Squirrel! Trivia question:  Who said, "I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford when I woke up every morning"?)

But pho.to also has a few fun tools including Funny Photo (eg a dog holding a "lost" poster of a human) and Avatar Photo.  If you're in for a laugh, though, we recommend a tour of Cartoon Photo.  I found the interface for pho-to a bit easier to use than loonapix.  In particular, I appreciated that, as I moved from one effect to another to experiment, it remembered the photo I had already uploaded and defaulted to it; loonapix repeatedly asked to re-upload the photo (although it seemed to use a cached version once I had selected it.)  I also liked the fact that - while pho.to allows users to create accounts for permanent storage of photos, creation of web albums, and so on - it does not require a user account to experiment with its features.  The best of both worlds.

Together with bighugelabs.com, these three sites provide students (and teachers) with a myriad of opportunities to engage in fun photo activities and projects.

Here are some samples of the possibilities of these web sites. Click the "Play" button to view the slideshow.