Weddingbee

Sitting around waiting for our professional pictures to arrive (we get them tomorrow!), I’ve had plenty of time to get my Flickr account nice and tidy. In doing so, I’ve discovered the wonderland that is Picnik, Flickr’s photo editing tool. And oh, what a wonderland it is. If Flickr is my crack addiction, Picnik is my own personal meth lab.

Scenario 1: Say you’re like me, and you’ve got a load of crappy pictures taking up your hard drive. But they’re not so crappy that you want to dump them - maybe they’re all you’ve got from some important event, or they’re the only shots you have of that one night your girlfriend Prudence reaaaallly cut loose.

Scenario 2: You’ve been inundated with all the mediocre photos your friends and family took at your wedding. (Don’t feel bad for thinking they’re mediocre. After all, everyone takes mediocre pictures sometime.) Or you have wedding planning photos you can’t bear to part with, in spite of the fact that you have eight trillion professional pics as well.

In either scenario, it’s Picnik to the rescue! It takes the most pedestrian, boring photos, and makes them look downright professional. It’s THE BOMB. I give you Exhibit A, a crappy photo of Mr. Lovebug and I at a hookah bar last year:

Crappy lighting, crappy composition, crappy everything. Still, it’s cute enough to want to keep, right? (Sort of like all those quasi-lame table shots your guests take at the wedding.) Now, take a look at what Picnik can do with it:

One of my favorite tools in Picnik is the “Lomo-ish” option, which (obviously enough) punches up the color of the photo and gives it a vignette.

But once you’ve given your blah photo some color oomph, there’s more that can be done. Something I love about professional photography that I can never imitate is the cool focus effect. I’m just not that advanced in my photographic endeavors (yet!).

Well, Picnik can help you fake just that effect, by pulling out a feature of the photo to focus on, and blurring the rest, such as Mr. Lovebug’s face:

…or mine:

…or even the hookah pipe:

These looks are achieved by using the “Focal Soften” option, which gives you an adjustable radius to move over the photo. And you can control how blurry the blur is (these are at the blurrier end of the scale).

Another cool trick is to put your CP (crappy photo) into “Holga-ish” effect:

This does more than just convert the photo to black and white; it imitates a Holga camera by diffusing the light, blurring and darkening the edges, and bringing the focus to the middle of the photo. It’s great for those shots with an ugly or cluttered background.

You can then take this effect and add in the “Focal Soften” effect, and you’ve got:

All of a sudden, a random, blah photo looks like it was (more or less) thoughtfully composed.

Not convinced? Here are some other Cps made vastly more interesting through Picnik (post-wedding leisure time rocks!):

From a veil shopping trip (I only wore the dress as a try-on reference, since it was the same blush pink as the one I’d ordered). I “Lomo” ized it for color, then put the focus on the gorgeous folds of the dress.

Man in Chinatown, San Francisco - Again, added “Lomo-ish” and “Focal Soften” options.

Our puppy, getting into some mischief - a bad angle suddenly becomes cool when you add “Holga-ish” and “Focal Zoom”.

Now, here’s the rub. While certain basic editing features of Picnik are free, some of the more advanced options - such as those I’ve used here - aren’t. It’s $25 for a year’s use of Picnik Premium. But hey - compared to Photoshop, that’s a bargain. Oh yeah, and it’s insanely easy to use. Point and click, the whole way through.

Just something to consider, if you’ve got some Cps laying around. Or, you know, a great shot of drunk Prudence that needs sprucing up.

• We Can Get Married!!!
• Shower Power