BeFunky.com Online Image Editor Overview

In this show, we get a little funky with “Digital Dave” giving a tour of a FREE to inexpensive, cool, and easy online image editor that you can do very fun things to images quickly. This tool will help promote traffic to your content and get more attention on social media, and you do not need to be a designer or know PhotoShop.

Episode Transcript

Hello everyone. This is Digital Dave, and we’re back on Where Marketing Meets Technology, and on this show, we’re going to get funky. You heard me, funky.

We’re going to be looking at a really cool image tool that is web-based called BeFunky.com. This tool, what’s so great about it is that it allows you to very, very easily manipulate images to do some very cool things. You can add filters to it, you can add text to it, framing, you can put fun images on top of images. What’s really great about BeFunky, there are two things; one is that there is a free version, although you can’t really do much with the free version because you can’t even download the images that you’ve created, but it’s certainly fun to play with. It is not expensive at all. It’s like three or four dollars a month or something like that if you pay for an annual subscription. It’s really great for people who want to make really fun images, don’t want to spend a lot of time doing it, and don’t really need to have the experience of a designer, of doing things in Photoshop.

What we’re going to do today is we’re going to take a tour of BeFunky.com, and that is B-E-F-U-N-K-Y.com, and once you get to BeFunky.com, you’ll need to create an account. Once you’ve created an account, again, you can use the free version to play around with it. We highly encourage you to take a look at the full version since it’s such a great tool. We’re going to actually just take a tour through this today. The very first thing we’re going to do is that this is the default image that comes up when you first log in to BeFunky. There are actually different things you can do within BeFunky. There’s a photo editor, a collage maker, and designer. We’re in the photo editor, and the other ones we will cover maybe in a different show, but we’ll be looking at the photo editor specifically today.

The nice thing about the photo editor is that not only can you apply filters and cool overlays and stuff like that to images that are there, you can actually upload your own images, so here’s what we’re going to do today. We’re going to build on an image that we are going to add some fun things too. The very first thing we’re going to do is go to upload, and we’re going to go to the computer, and we’re going to do this for an image for one of our businesses, which is our coffee and smoothie business. This is an image of an event that we did, which I think is pretty fun and pretty cool. The very first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to play with some overlays onto this image. Actually, they’re not even overlays, but they’re reformatting the images, so we’re going to do things like an oil painting. We’re going to look at each one of these individually.

The first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to go to the cartoonizer DLX and just apply that. You can see right away it changes that image into almost like a painting. Here’s an oil painting. Here’s an underpainting DLX, what that looks like. That effect looks pretty cool, oil painting. These are all standard. These are all things that you can apply. You can scroll down and there are different ones. Let’s try watercolor. All right. I think of these, we’re going to probably go with the underpainting DLX. It doesn’t distort it as much, and you can use different ones if you want to. You can go to the cartoonizer, and we can make a cartoon out of it and see what it looks like. These are all under artsy. I don’t like that one as much. Go back, and they have all different ones that you can apply, so I’m going to go back to the digital art, and I’m going to go back to the underpainting. I think that one works best for this one.

The only thing is you can’t really see the writing here. It gets kind of distorted too much, so one of the things you can do is you can go to the settings, and you can do things like adjusting it. Maybe we’ll go to the paint, and maybe brush strength, we’ll bring it down some, maybe to 50, and brush size maybe a little smaller. Oh, this is actually if you want to apply a brush. This isn’t actually adjusting it, so your adjustments for this one are only those two, so you can’t really do much once it’s been reformatted into the underpainting or whatever we chose. That’s okay. Again, we’re just playing here, we’re having some fun. I’m going to go back to cartoonizer, apply the cartoonizer to it. Yeah, that one I don’t really like. I think underpainting still does the best job.

Some of these, you can go into the settings and actually really adjust the, let’s see what that does. That’s less sharpened. I’m going to try more sharpened. I’m trying to get these words to show in something so that you can actually read them unless they’re in the true image, so it doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to do that with that one, so maybe we’ll try, no. We’ll just keep playing with this one, see where we get to. Maybe we’ll take it down to 18. Yeah, I don’t think we’re going to be able to apply that one to this one, actually, although it was kind of fun. What we are going to do now is re-upload the image. That’s kind of a quick way to start over again is just to re-upload it, so we’re going to re-bring it in there, and we’re back to the original.

We’ll just do some fun things with the actual image because I really want to try to keep the wording that’s already here and kind of play with some things on top of that. The first thing we’re going to do to this image is we’re going to go down, and you can do different things. You can edit just some of the basic stuff, you can do some touch-up, you can add some effects. Let’s look at some of the effects. Maybe we want to add an effect to this. Yeah, I don’t like those, cooler, maybe grunge. Let’s see what grunge does. Oh, grunge is really going to change that. I don’t think we want to apply these. Let’s see some of these filters that are being applied to it, it really changes. Pick this one, wow, look at that. It just really changes the image. We’re going to go back and we’re just going to not apply that to it.

We’re going to go back here, and if you click back off of it, generally it will un-apply it, or you can re-upload the image again. We’re going to just come down here, one thing I do want to apply to this is a frame. There are different kinds of frames that you can put around this. You can do filmstrip, which is kind of fun. It’s generally like it looks like a film. Let me try this one here. Look at that, that’s pretty wild, really changes it. Maybe that one, yeah, you can see the filmstrip look here on the top and the bottom, and maybe what you do is you adjust it a little bit, the image. You can adjust it a little bit. There are different adjustments you can make, although that’s not the one I want to apply. I just wanted to show that one here.

I’m going to go down to the grunge affect. I think this one would look good with a grunge border on it, so I’m going to add a grunge border around this image, and again, you can kind of play with it a little bit. You can flip the image if you need to, and you can make some basic adjustments to the actual grunge border. They have different ones here that they provide. I think I like this one the best. What we’re going to do at this point is I’m going to go ahead and apply that, and I’m going to save this. We’re going to go ahead and save this out to our computer, and we’re going to save this in the highest resolution we can for now, which is going to be a PNG. We’re going to save this out, and we’ll just stick it in our folder here, and we’ll call it something else. Grunge Fun or something, I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter what we call it for now. We’re going to save that into that same folder.

What I’ve done is I’ve really applied that layer to this already. What you can do once you’ve added the layer and applied it is that you can go ahead and start adding additional things to it. The way I do this, to be safe in this tool, is I actually just re-upload the image so that we get the brand-new image and these are hard set on here. Now, we can go back and again, we can apply some of our other stuff. Let’s say we want to try cartoonizing now with the border and see what that looks like. Well, this looks pretty good because here in the cartoonized version of this, you can read it. You can mostly read it, and I believe here you can clutter cleaner, sketch detail, I think we can turn this either down or up and it’ll make it clear. It really isn’t doing much there, so we’re going to go here. Maybe will do the clutter cleaner, turn it down, see what we get.

You can see it’s making minor adjustments to it, nothing significant. I liked it kind of where was, so we’re just going to X off of this, and we’re going to go back and reapply that. We’re going to make this a cartoon at this point, so we can kind of see that. Again, once you’re done here, if click check and apply, you’ve applied that to this particular image, and you can go on to the next thing you want to do. Let’s say we want to add some text to this. Let’s add, maybe lucky is a pretty good text font. I like that. We’re going to put some lucky text on there because we think this is lucky. In the text designer, we can set the size, so maybe we’ll make this 40. If you click on the text itself, then you can add the text. We’re going to say something like that, that’ll be our color.

If I click off of that, I can then go over here and I can adjust the size of the box, I can make it bigger. Maybe I want to put this on the right side going down the right column, or maybe down the left column, try that. Yeah, that looks pretty good, except for I don’t like the smoothies wrapping, so we’ll pull this a little wider so we get that. All right. That’ll work. All right, so we’re going to go ahead and apply this. The first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to move it over just a little bit off the edge here, and we’re going to go here and we’re going to change the color of the text. Maybe we’ll do something that’s a little bit fun, maybe a pink or something like that. I think that looks pretty cool. How about pink, and it looks like in this background, we can go with a white border, so we’ll click on it here, and we’ll get our border color here.

It’s right now black, so we want to make it white, or maybe a gray, a really light gray. Yeah, something like that looks pretty good. Click back on that, you can see there’s some black there. We can get rid of our background. Now it’s completely transparent. That is how you can take an image in BeFunky and apply multiple fun things to it and make it look very, very different from what we originally started with. It makes this image very unique. One thing about this image is it’s lost some of its colors, so I’m not sure I would stay with this, but the idea was to illustrate how to apply different effects that are within BeFunky to a single image, and some of the things that you can do that this editor allows you to do. It’s a lot more extensive than that. It has editing tools where you can do some pretty significant changing to the photo itself and some touch-up tools like a standard editor.

This is kind of almost like a full-featured editor, but the thing I really like about it is how quick and easy it is to apply some fun things. Maybe just for fun, we’ll go ahead and add an image to it. We’re going to add another image, so maybe we’ll pick summer here, and we’ll look for something. Oh, coconut. That’s perfect. All right, so we’re going to add this over here, and we’re going to make this our coconut drink. The thing about this is that when you apply the layers to it, you really got to apply them in the order that you want. I can’t get back to this one now. What I like to do is I like to save the image at each step of the way. That’s what we’re going to do here. I’m going to remove that, and I’m going to save this image, actually, I’m going to go back and we’re going to apply this first, and then we’re going to put this as an overlay on top of that.

The easiest way I found to do things like that is to just literally apply them one at a time, so maybe we want to put the coconut drink on here now. We’ll put our little coconut here, and we’ll make it a little smaller here. We can do some adjustments to that, and what you do is when you’re ready to apply that to the actual image itself, you hit flatten layers, and it’ll actually apply that to the image so this becomes part of the image. It’s still in layers, but it’s part of the image. You can see that I can’t click on that anymore, and I really can’t go back once I’ve done that and changed it, so to go back, I’d have to again, go back and pull my previous image. That’s why I like to make my layers part of each image as I build it. At this point, I’m going to save this just so I have it, and we’ll just call this, again PNG, Grunge Fun 2, and will save this over here.

We’re going to now get a second copy of that, which we can always refer back to. What I could do is upload that again if I want to, or I can go over here, and I’m going to do my final piece to this one, which was added the text, so we’re going to go back to our lucky text font. Unfortunately, sometimes it doesn’t re-save what we’ve chosen before, so I have to kind of figure out where I was. It was probably a little bit more pink, maybe something like that, and I think we made this 30. Let’s see what 30 does. That’s going to probably be pretty good. You got to click right on the text to get it into edit mode. Maybe that’s our message here, and again, you can click off of that. I can go and resize that and play with it. Like I said, I want to try to put it on my border here.

What you’ll notice is that right away, that this is overlaying over top the coconut, and that was the effect that I was going for by saving these and adding it back into the project, and then putting a new layer on top of that, I’m able to keep a copy of what I had before, not lose it, and be able to apply new things to it. Now, I’m going to go ahead and change this a little bit. I’m going to change this to, again, a lightish gray, and I always click off of it. Then here, we’re going to go back and take care of our background. That looks pretty good, right? Actually, I’m going to make this bigger. I think we can go bigger here, so let’s make this 40, see what we get. That looks good. There we go. You can still see the coconut, so there we go. That looks pretty good, so now I’m done.

I’m going to say that I finished up what I wanted to do with this image, and you can see we’ve done multiple things. We added an effect to it, actually, interestingly enough, we lost our effect. We never saved that, our actual effect that we changed it into a cartoon, so what I’m going to do is before I add this layer to it and apply it by hitting flattened layers, I’m going to delete it. Can I do that? Will it let me out? It looks like it won’t let me out of it at this point. Okay, there we go. Okay, I’m going to delete this, and I’m going to go back and I’m going to physically now apply that. I think we used cartoonizer, cartoon, and we lost that before, remember? We wanted it to be cartoonized, so we’re going to go ahead and now we’re going to save this. We might say, you know, to PNG, save, and we’ll call this 3.

We’ll save that, and then we’ll go ahead and upload that so I get just that image as an image with all my layers already applied. Now, I’m going to go ahead and add my text back in there. It probably would be better to copy that. We’ll start with the color this time. I think we were down here in the pink, pink here, and the background was a very light gray. We’ll go like that, and we’ll get rid of the transparent. Next thing we do is we’re going to change this. I think we had this at 40, click on the text. Of course, this wouldn’t be my real ad, but it is there. We’re going to go ahead and try to put the places back roughly where we had it before. Maybe I’m going to get smoothies all together, so I can just make this until I get it, and then we’ll go drop this right here.

That looks pretty cool. Now what we’ve done is we have now applied all of the layers to it, and by saving it out in pieces, I could always go back to a previous place or spot and be able to change what I wanted to. I think you can do control-Z here up to a point as well, and it will take back things that were there. It looks like you have a history over here, where you can back things out to a point, so I’m doing control-Z, and you can see it’ll take me back to where I last saved the image. That’s why I said sometimes I think it’s a good idea just to save it out in pieces. Now, I’m trying to do control= Y, which would normally add those back in, and it’s not doing it, but if I click on these, it actually reapplies them one at a time, so we’re going to get back to where we were.

We’ve now brought it back to where we were. Now, I’m going to do save, computer, and I’m going to save this as kind of a higher-size graphic for now. Eventually, I’d probably save it as a JPEG, just to reduce the actual physical size of the document, and that is our image. This is how you can use this tool called BeFunky to create some very cool and fun images, just things that are different that you don’t necessarily see all the time to get attention. They have a lot of built-in stuff in here, a lot of different fonts for things. You can actually use your own fonts that are on your computer, you can add frames, graphics, you can add text. We did a few things. We added an overlay, not even an overlay, I guess it’s a redraw of the image. We didn’t add an effect, we did out of frame, we did add a graphic, the coconut.

We did not add an overlay, but we did add some text. You can also apply textures if you want to, which is kind of a cool feature. If you click on textures, and maybe you want this right here and you want to apply a weird texture to your image, you can apply that like this one here. That’s actually kind of cool. It looks like it’s kind of looking through a window or a mirror reflection off a window with some lights. You can really add some very cool things to your images to make them really stand out. Again, this tool is called BeFunky.com, B-E-F-U-N-K-Y.com. This is Digital Dave. This is it for this show. Please check back soon, and we look forward to having you on our next episode of Where Marketing Meets Technology.