The Art of Being Funky

Week Seven

I decided to give BeFunky a test drive this week. This free cloud-based application provides the ability to alter photos, create greeting cards, and collages. I explored many of the drag and drop, point and click features that it provides. As a professional graphic designer, I was not impressed with the collage or greeting card features, as they have little to offer and are a bit rudimentary. Next, I explored the photo editing capabilities. For a cloud-based application it had many of the same capacities of the free photo editor that came with my Mac. You can change the Red, Green, or Blues in the Color Mixer feature, modify the exposure tilt, tint, touch up auto enhance, crop resize, cutout, replace color, etc.

Some of the special effects were very easy to adjust with the movement of a slider bar. The Beautify made me look 20 years younger by removing dark shadows and bags. Smoothing was akin to a Gaussian Blur in Photoshop. Vignette created a radial gradient on the photo edge, which could be modified. The clarity feature was a sharpen, while vibrance ranged from whitewashed to having a sun-kissed glow. Auto-enhance made the photo look like a very yearbookesque touch up. BeFunky also provides many texture effects that range from having the appearance of a charcoal drawing to a more pixelated, pop art or an old-timey photo. While many of the niftier effects are an upgrade, I can see the value of the free version if you did not have any other desktop photo altering programs on your computer. This program might work nicely for an amateur who may desire using it from their mobile device for enhancing their poorly shot social media photos. For a professional, Photoshop offers a wider variety of completely customizable photo filters, but has a bit of a learning curve and a membership fee that many can't afford. The happy medium may be Gimp a free program which is reminiscent of a '90s version of both Illustrator and Photoshop combine. With this one would be able to create their own greeting cards, collages, or apply special effects on photos. The limitation is that a computer and a little application savvy is required.