Look at your family photo album. Doesn't everyone look tired – or drunk? Just look at how bloodshot everyone's eyes are!
At second glance, maybe the eyes aren't bloodshot – but just red, as in red-eye effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-eye_effect), one of the mass plagues of the digital photo era. You don't notice the red eye until the photo is up on the screen, ready to be printed or e-mailed, at which point you panic (“I can't let them see the kids looking like that!”). If you took pictures of your kids at the Lag B'omer campfire last night, you know what “red eye” is all about this morning!
Many digital photo programs (Picasa, iPhoto, and the programs that came with your digital camera) have software that can help correct red eye, at least somewhat. But why make do with a minor league editor, when you can use a behemoth of a photo editor that can turn red eyes – or hair, faces, or any other feature – into any other color you can imagine, let you integrate photos, add animations, turn your pictures into a sketch, cartoon, poster, or even a postcard – for free!
It's not Photoshop – but Fotoflexer (http://fotoflexer.com/), the free online super photo editor, comes awfully close. Many of the tools used by most casual users of Photoshop (as opposed to professional graphics designers) are right there in Fotoflexer, as well as several advanced tools found in almost no other free photo editor, such as working in layers, where you can superimpose elements of a photo on another one and play with the opacity of the layers.
And Fotoflexer gets more advanced all the time; they've just added tools to allow you to make customized selections on a photo, so you can work on just that area, swapping out colors and even replacing whole elements, like people. That's how they make all those phony Reuters photos (http://www.zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/)! Then there are the “fun tools,” like morphing (one photo gradually turning into another), animated stars or stickers, adding your face to a postcard or fun photo (like the “Hanukkah dog!”), adding text, bulging, twisting, squishing, or even smoothing out wrinkles! All editing is done online at an extremely fast clip, and you can save photos on the site or download them. Photoshop, move over!
Friday, May 23, 2008
