Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Online photo editing / image searches... spreading the love ( a little early)


How could you resist??? Those fun guys over at Picnik have released some great Valentines Day add-ons just in time for Feb 14th. If you've not used Picnik before, you should, because it's really easy and fun. All you need are some class photos that you want to jazz up a little. You don't need to register. The full 'Premium Edition' is only $24.95. Not much if a school registers for a year. My class had great fun designing Christmas posters as part of their Enterprise last term. You can see the fantastic results below.

We also had fun using the Big Huge Labs site to design our own Christmas Top Trumps trading cards. This site had loads of amazingly easy but impressive graphic design options. Loads of visual fun and literacy combined.
There are one or two other online photo editing sites I have discovered that have some cool features. Take a look at Pikifix, Pixenate, Fotoflexer, and Splashup. But I like Picnik the best!

I'm finding the Creative Commons search engine, a great one stop shop for searching for images okay to use in school. Other online free stock photography sources I find useful are openphoto, pixel perfect digital and freefoto.com.

For more specific image requests I really like NASA, and geography resources here and here. The New York Public Library online resource is fantastic and the BBC have recorded a great sweep of the UK here.

Animation Backgrounds is a blog with an amazingly rich collection of old, yes you guessed it, animation backgrounds. As for Pictures from Old Books, well I'm sure you're already there.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great stuff, thanks for sharing.
Do you have more than one pupil logged onto picnik at once?
I am wondering how our network will handle it. I guess there is only one way to find out.

Unknown said...

Great to see Picnik being used in school. New features are added on a regular basis. Although I have Photoshop (CS3 and elements I find I am using them less and less - especially for web stuff. Your picture makes me think perhaps we should ask them to add some stamps for Burns night.

Mr M said...

We weren't logged on at all to Picnik. You don't need to to use their standard features. Ignore the signing in bit and click on 'upload photo' to the right of the screen. This makes it really user friendly. You can also access it via flickr if you have an account there. Once you are finished creating you can just save your image jpeg to your pictures folder.
Burns night stamps is a great idea!
I'm sure there will be some great Easter ones on the way soon too!

Anonymous said...

Thanks Mr M. That sounds great.
Unfortunately we cannot use flickr in school, but we should be able to use other photos.