Windmill House - edited in Picnik

This is a private residence in Wheaton, Illinois - an iconic custom home that is rather famous, locally. I thought the picture was rather boring by itself, so I edited it in Picnik with this interesting effect.

Most of the photos I've seen of this home show telephone lines obstructing the view, which detract from the subject.

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It's a hard life

A cropped portrait of a neighbor, whose hard life is showing on his face.

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Getting the HDR effect

My results on a photo getting that sought-after HDR effect. In Picnik, you can create it without ever fooling with Photoshop. Lucky for me, because I don't have photoshop.

This rendering is a combination of Picnik effects.

I have experimented here with several different effects to achieve variations of the HDR effect.

And here is the original photo, below:

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Using Picnik

Picnik is an extremely easy-to-use online photo editing resource that is free. I do not have the paid version yet, but you can see what dramatic images can be created just with the free version in this post.

This collection of four photos was made into a collage with Picnik. There are many more options for creating collages in the paid version of Picnik.

This is an enhanced version of the original photograph of a man giving his dog coaching about what to focus on during dock diving, with the facilitator standing there smiling at them.

This is a comparison of the before and after images of a snap of the dock diving event I attended. The "before" image was good, but the "after" image has much deeper richer colors, and really brings the characters into the forefront.

The free version of Picnik includes HDR-looking conversions, which you can see in this shot of the green heron. The original was almost backlit, as the heron was standing in the shade with dappled sunlight on the grass in the background. I wasn't very happy with it; but the HDR image punches up the detail of the bird, and makes it more interesting. Here are more effects using the free version of Picnik to enhance that photo.

I would strongly suggest trying Picnik out to enhance your photos; the effects you can get even in the 'free version' of it are spectacular. And applying effects like this to a mediocre photo can bring you surprisingly good results.

Just with the free version alone, there are so many possibilities for combinations of effects, it boggles the mind!

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