In addition to setting up a Flickr account and taking it for a whirl, I decided to try out the three photo editing sites suggested on the OCL 23 Things blog. My impressions are that Picnik is just about the coolest site ever (although speaking of personal experience, it can be slow to load whenever you need it most), FotoFlexer is surprisingly powerful and easy to use, and that Splashupseems like a nice free alternative to Photoshop but the learning curve is much steeper than for Picnik or FotoFlexer.

I’ve used Picnik in a public computer class series on digital photos, and it was a hugehit. The students (all older adults) loved playing around with the sample photos. Now that the premium features are all available for free, this is an even more fun site to play with. I think FotoFlexer provides a few more effects, but the overall look and feel isn’t as nice. Both link up easily to Flickr, making it super convienent for retrieving photos to edit and share. (Flickr, by the way, didn’t go over as well with that same computer class; they weren’t buying into the social aspect of it.)

Another great, practical use for Picnik in libraries is for resizing photos. I get a lot of middle school students looking for pictures to spruce up reports and presentations, but often times the things they find in Google Image results are too small. Loading the pictures into Picnik takes two shakes. There’s a setting under the Printing tab for “Full Page Print”. It’s super fast and it makes everyone happy!

Speaking of being happy, I just goofed around with Picnik and FotoFlexer and came up with these:

The Lakewood Fiction Shelves as done in OCL Blue and White:

The Lakewood Fiction Shelves as Done in Paint By Number Style:

The Lakewood Fiction Shelves as Done as a Pen and Ink Wash:

(I stumbled on that look after I inverted a neon blue wash. I was such an odd result but I loved it so much I made it my blog header.)

And last but not least, my favorite: