Free Digital Photo Tools

Today's digital cameras give great results but there's always room for improvement or experimenting with diffderent effects. While the Photoshop programs or their competitors give you the best results, there are also ways to accomplish some projects for free. For example, you can make mosaic collages, fake movie or magazine covers, blog headers or apply special effects at http://BigHugeLabs.com. All the images shown here started from my personal library, and were saved from Bighugelabs with no further processing.

The simplest features let you add special effects to your image. Choose a style:

• · Black & white
• · Monochrome
• · Painting
• · Sepia
• · Charcoal drawing
• · Halftone
• · Negative
• · Radial blur
• · Sketch
• · Swirl
• · Implode
• · Edges

Then upload your picture and see the results. If you like it, you can save it for free. The site makes its money by selling hard copy prints of your own design, or from the many samples they provide. You can also join for a small fee, which lets you store images on their site rather than uploading them each time.

The Mosaic Maker lets you quickly combine several images into one.

There's also an extensive pop art toolkit. Including one that makes multiple images from your single picture.

You can design posters, with title and text.  You can also make calendars, trading cards, wallpaper and add frames or mattes to any image.  Almost all choices are free.  You can download the image you create. Or, you can buy a printed version.  One interesting feature, obviously not savable, is the ability to create customized physical  jigsaw puzzles from your photographs.

If you're just getting started in digital photography, this site gives an easy and free introduction to many of the tools available.  If you're already experienced, you may find it's quicker and easier to use the poster and other tools for quickly adding text to images, rather than using your photo editor.