Skip to main content

Add Creativity To Your Photography Projects With A Little Help From Big Huge Labs


Digital photos are great, but often times we just post them straight to a website page or let them languish on our computers. For several years now,however, Big Huge Labs has provided some awesome and practical photo related projects that can be done in a short amount of time, with very little computer skills needed.
The site includes over two dozen projects that can be printed and/or posted on the web. Projects include various custom poster ideas, custom trading cards, calendars, desktop wallpaper, a pocket album, a CD Cover template, slide show generator, and much more.

Each Big Huge Labs project is template-based, and the process for completing projects is as follows:

Hockneyizer

This example is based on the what’s called the Hockneyizer project, a college of Polaroid frames based on a selected image.
biglab2.jpg
  1. Select and upload one or more photos, depending the project you’re doing. If you have photos on a Flickr.com or Facebook account, you can access them from the Big Huge Labs site, or you can upload them from your computer.
  2. Customize the background and other items of the project.
  3. Click the Create button and your project is completed, in less than a minute.

You can save and download a web size copy of each project for free, or you can get a pro account for high resolution prints.
While the projects on the site are great, I want to highlight a few, plus point out a few other resources the site has to offer.

Motivator

This project enables you to make a motivational poster, the kind that you often see sold in gift shops. You can create your own title and caption to fit your photo. Jackson touched on it a while back.

Cube

This is a fun project for your children. It requires a set of six photos that are copied to a template that can be printed out on say Matte paper and folded into a cube.

Color Palette Generator

If you’re designing a website and you want to figure out what color(s) match your main photo for a particular page, or if you’re looking a color to frame your photos, this little resource can be very useful. Once a photo is uploaded, it just a few seconds to deliver a palette of swatches that match the selected photo.
biglab9.jpg

Top Digital Camera

Another handy resource on the site provides a list of “top cameras and models to create photos uploaded to Flickr”, a worldwide and popular photo sharing website. This list is automatically updated based on EXIF data gotten from photographers who upload images to the Flickr account. Each camera model listed is linked to a Amazon.com product page for the selected camera.

Pocket Album

This project involves creating a small size photo album of selected photos. The album is small enough that you don’t really need the full resolution size of the project. Printing the project on Matte paper should be sufficient.

Slideshow

If you’re looking to create and post a slide show of photos on the web, Big Huge Labs overs a really simple way to do so. However, each photo you want to use in the slide show needs to be uploaded to a website, with a URL for each individual image. This is best done if your photos are uploaded to Flickr.com. After selecting your images and creating your slide show, you get a URL for the show hosted by Big Huge Labs.

Many other projects and resources on the Big Huge Lab site are mainly for Flickr.com members, but there’s enough creative projects for anyone who wants to do some fun things with digital images.
So what novel ways do you make use of your digital images? Let us know about the resources you use.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document
1 comment
Read more

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th
Post a Comment
Read more

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a
Post a Comment
Read more