SUPER fun new thing!

So, I'm pretty sure none of us really needs a new thing to suck up our time . . . there's already plenty: facebook, blog reading {mine is worth reading, but there are some . . . }, laundry, shelfari, cleaning, YouTube, paying bills, online games {can you say Scramble??} . . . I could go on and on! But, I found a new, very fun, seemingly worthwhile website. Picnik. At Picnik you can do super fun and cool edits to your pictures. Now, you could {and I VERY easily could get completely sucked in, but I'm trying to exhibit a little restraint here} go way overboard and edit every single picture you take to make it absolutely cool and fabulous . . . but really, you don't need to and you know it! Plus that would take you about 25 years and you would miss out on lots of fun life {that you could be photographing} during that time. I almost want to be selfish and not tell anyone else about this cool site because then I could mess around with my pictures and make them uber-wonderful and people would think I was cool and ultra talented and would ask me how I did that and stuff. But I think you would have fun too, so I gave in and decided to be generous and share my newly found wealth of fun and information with you, my friends!

So, here you go. A quick Picnik overview. I took my favorite picture {ok, that sounds a little too decisive for me . . . scratch that and let's say "one of" my favorite picture(s)} of Anna and played with it. I took this picture of Anna in her diaper pail {that diaper there in the bottom is clean . . . NOT dirty, so don't fret} last July. She was about 4 months old. Isn't she just the cutest thing?

Here's what I started with:

And here's some of the fun things you can do to your pictures at Picnik:

Posterize:

Add snow {which would be extra funny if you were outside, say, in the desert}:

Sepia:

Pencil sketch:

Duo tone {you can pick any 2 colors you want . . . I thought these were fun and girly}:

Stickers {all manner of fun stuff you can add to your picture . . . there were TONS of these, I just picked a few!}:

This is called "60's" and it basically just makes your picture look like it is from the 60's {duh} by changing the color and rounding the corners . . . love it! {and since ALL people used cloth diapers in the 60's, I thought it was extra appropriate for this particular shot}:

The possibilities are really infinite, so these are but a few {very few} examples of the range of fun stuff they've got. You can do all the normal stuff like make it black and white and erase redeye and add captions to the pictures and that kinda stuff too. A few other features I like TONS, but didn't really do much for this particular picture are: focal b&w and focal soften where you can focus in on one part of the picture (say, your kid in a group shot) and make the rest of the picture either black and white or out of focus and fuzzy . . . since Anna's face is pretty much the only thing in this particular shot it would not have been a good example! If you scroll down in the blog {or just click here}, I DID do "focal soften" to the picture of Lydia's missing teeth. You can kinda see {if you look closely} that the papers on the desk and Kirbs' arm are a little blurry. Fun, huh?

You can also become a premium member of Picnik for $25/year and do even more cool stuff. But really, there's plenty to do for free, so I don't think that's nesa. Sorry, if you're confused . . . that's a little joke you might not get if you're not from my family. Our favorite movie of all time is "High Anxiety" a 1977 Mel Brooks film. One of our favorite {although there are MANY} lines from that movie is "You don't tell me what's nesa, I tell you what's nesa!" Phonetically, I'm not sure how to spell "nesa", but it's short for necessary, so just start to say "necessary" and interrupt yourself and that's the word I'm going for . . . but I digress . . . You can do a million and one things without spending $25 for the extra premium stuff. So, check it out. But set a timer or something to limit yourself or the next thing you know it might be 2011! Enjoy!