One of my all-time favorite websites is Big Huge Labs. It was even my pick of the week for episode 31 of the Paperclipping Digi Show podcast. It’s a site full of free tools that let you play with your pictures.
My most used Big Huge Labs tool is definitely the mosaic maker!
You can use it in conjunction with Flickr, or simply upload individual photos and quickly create mosaics. I use it all the time on my blog (like the above image illustrating the projects I made in 2009). I created an entire album using these mosaics for my Inspired by Color self paced project class at Big Picture Classes.
There are several other tools I love on Big Huge Labs as well, like the Map Maker. Such a cool way to illustrate all the places I’ve traveled to! You can make a map of certain countries, or the whole world. Here’s where I’ve been in the United States. Looks like I’ve covered the West, but hardly made a dent in the rest!
The color palette generator is a tool I used a lot as a designer. I still use it as a scrapper when I’m looking for colors to match my photos.
The Pop Art Poster tool lets you take a photo like this:
and turn it into pop art fun like this:
It’s easy to add fun effects to photos with the FX tool. Here’s a picture of my cute nephew
and I quickly turned it into a black and white photo with just one click
One of my favorite tools is the calendar maker. You upload the photo and Big Huge Labs makes the calendar.
That’s just a small sampling of what you can do on Big Huge Labs. Now go and have some Big Huge Fun!