Take a bite out of Bytes: Usefull Websites to play With photos

WATERMARK

So after spending the day snapping like crazy, the photographer comes up against a new problem – copyright. As a freelance writer, I discovered my work stolen by two websites on two separate occasions when playing with CopyScape. The feeling of anger and to be honest, helplessness is awful.
What can you do? It’s the internet and tracking down someone is like looking for a needle in a haystack. However, with photographs the creators can protect them by adding in a watermark that will stop people from stealing their work.

A great (and free) online tool I found that can do this is a photography website called Watermark. This has a good free account option with the ability to upgrade to the premium account if you so wish. The free account does all you would really need. You can mark multiple photos at once and you can customise the watermark with different text, colours, size and effects as seen in the screenshot.
The only bad parts to the free account that you would notice is that a picture cannot be any larger than 0.5Mb which shouldn’t obstruct you much if you’re only posting them online. Also, it doesn’t save your watermark for when you come back later.
Both Karl and Jim have discussed watermarking alternatives here and here.

Fotopedia

Finally when the photograph has been taken, edited, resized and protected there comes the time to publish it. Sure, one could indeed use Flickr or perhaps a personal blog but for me, Fotopedia stands out from the rest.

With Fotopedia, photographs are organised and even voted upon by users as one of the main features to determine which ones should represent each category. Many of the photographs actually come from other web services such as Flickr as seen under them in the photographer’s credit area. You’re assured that you’re getting the best of the best however, as irrelevant or low quality photos are removed from the categories via the user vote system.

photofunia

PhotoFunia lets you add cool photo effects to your pictures online wihin a matters of seconds. PhotoFunia provides you with a huge collection of templates where you can insert a face of your choice. Select the template, uplod your pic, and let PhotoFunia do the hard work and add your face to the template. Once the image is ready you can download and save it to your computer.

Features:

Add cool photo effects and create funny face photo montages online.
Generate as many pictures as you like.
Supported image formats: JPG, PNG and GIF.
Maximum allowed image size is 500 KB.
Chhose between 70 funny photo templates and more being added.
Save pictures to your hard drive using “Save as” option (right click on the image).
Check out photos created by other PhotoFunia users.

Here are a couple samples created using Photfunia

Check out PhotoFunia @ http://www.photofunia.com/

Dumpr and FunPhotoBox

Dumpr is another website that lets you choose the effect, upload your photo and get instant results. FunPhotoBox is also similar in concept. Together, all three sites give you plenty of effects and options to choose from and get the perfect effect you were looking for, according to your photo.

Mosaics and Collages

If you would like to create a photo mosaic or collage, check out pixisnap and photovisi. Photovisi is excellent for collages where as pixisnap can be used for creating photomosaics as well as collages. Also check out these cool photomosaic software.

TiltShiftMaker

TiltShiftMaker allows you to transform your real life photo scenes into miniature models. Just upload the photo, choose the area to focus on and presto you have your effect.
Looks great on photos of city scenes, mountains where the whole aspect of the scene has been captured in the image as opposed to a single object.