Fun & Free

I thought it'd be good to share some of the fun programs I've found online that I like using. The first one up is from Poladroid. If you go there and download the program, this fun little guy(follow the fork) pops up on your desktop when you click on the Poladroid icon. Just open up your Pictures folder, select, and slide a picture over. After a few seconds a polaroid pops out and actually 'develops'. Above is what it looked like after about 15 seconds(follow the spoon).

Here's the view of the picture once it's fully developed(you can speed up that process if you want by double clicking on the picture). You can also save copies of all of the pictures you take with the Poladroid program. It's awesome.

Next, one of my favorites. I don't have Photoshop and as much as I like have the Kodak editing program that came with our digi camera, it just isn't much fun. I am now hooked on Picnik though, so the 'creative photo editing program' craving has been satisfied.

It's incredible and does just what I need. It's got all of the basics like cropping, red eye editing, color changing, etc. It goes a bit further when you hit the Create tab. You can add text, frames, photo effects, 'stickers' and a few other things. Here's a basic example.

From this......

To this......

I really enjoyed the 'Orton-ish' effect I used for that. There's really a ton to do on there. Definitely check out the stickers(like the fork/spoon I used for the Poladroid bit).

Ok, last but not least. Wordle is semi new to me, but I tried it out earlier today and it's a snap to do. It "Is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like." Sounds strange, but check it out. I made this one using nicknames we have for the Little Man.

Working backwards now, once you're on the main page just click on Create. You'll have a large text box to fill with whatever words you want. One note, I had to put things like 'Climber Dude' and 'Little Man' together to keep the meaning straight. Once you enter that it spits out a very generic option, which you can then alter a bit. Here's a screen shot after I'd changed the font and colors.

You can also change the layout on it. I went through all of the font/layout options before settling on this. It just worked. One glitch to the site is that when you save it, it is saved for all the world to see. To avoid this you can either print it right away, or save it on your computer using the 'Print Screen' button. In case you haven't used this, just hit that button on your keyboard, open up a program like Paint, and then Paste. Voila! I'm itching to go back and create a cheesy yet wonderful one with a love/family theme. That could be cute.

I'm always on the lookout for more fun sites, so let me know if you have any!