As the latest trends in internet marketing and social media point out to great visual content I am in a constant hunt for awesome design applications and lately, I discovered another free online photo editing tool with which you can make miracles, literally.
Be Funky Review
Website: BeFenky
.. “The Ultimate BeFunky experience” .. “design your dream” .. “photo editing and graphic design made for everyone” .. are among the slogans you notice when you enter their homepage.
Excited I started right away
Photo Editor
On the right side is the canvas, on the left is the tool dashboard.
Edit Features
Auto Enhance
Essentials
- Crop, Resize. Rotate, Cutout, Background, Exposure
- Beautify, Color, Sharpen, Vignette
Blur & Smooth
- Smoothing. Blur, Funky focus, Soften, Blur edges
Miscellaneous
- Tilt, Tint, Levels, Color Mixer
As you can see only the Edit Mode has plenty of options. Let’s move on
Image 01
You have the option to upload one of yours or use one of their libraries. I’ll go with the latter.
I selected Beautify at 63%, Vignette with current settings (I got dark corners), and lastly Blur Edges…Pretty amazing result in less than 30 seconds.
Image 02
I will choose one of my royalty-free collection
I selected Crop just to check how it works. It is so easy you won’t believe it.
Next, I applied a Funky focus with radial and blur set to 2%. Then from the Levels menu, I chose the Midtones Darker preset. Another awesome utility.
As I was working I noticed a very useful feature. On the right side of the canvas there is a history tab showing you all the actions you applied so far.
Let’s see what is in the Effects tab of the dashboard.
- Featured
- Winter
- Chromatic
- Black & White
- Charcoal
I want the chromatic # 2, effect amount to 45%…Just beautiful. Now let’s add some text
There are some cool Text presets or you can add your own. The presets are marvelous and you can set the main color, outline and background color for your letters. Of course, there are options to change the font, size, spacing, opacity and many many more…
Image 03
The application offers a layer function. That is unique and only expensive software can do that. Let’s see, I need 2 images to merge and mix. I opened my collection and worked on that for a while.
Now I want a frame (come with presets as well) and I am ready.
I will display the 2 original images and then the result in order to have a better understanding.
® Original
In the Mix
Image 04
I uploaded an image to the application and proceeded with the…
Graphics Library
There are so many presets that can satisfy even the most demanding individual. Every set includes many different elements.
The categories are
- Food, Geometry, Earth’s day, Valentine’s day
- Featured, Winter, Accessories, Animals
- Baby, birthday, design elements, emoticons
- Halloween, mother’s day, St Patrick’s day, Love
- Thanksgiving, Monsters, music, numbers
- Spring, autumn, speech bubbles, sports
- Stickers, zodiac, father’s day, summer
Let’s do it …
I chose a Bat from the Halloween set, I know it seems gigantic but we need some fun and BeFunky is a guarantee.
Then I took a robot from Valentine’s day set and placed it on the top of a roof.
I realized that I had to make a cartoonish effect so I moved onto the …
Artsy Palette
This is one of the top features in BeFunky.You can choose from
- Featured, Cartoonizer, Gouache
- Impressionist, Inkify, Oil Painting
- Pointillism, Sketcher, Under Painting, Watercolor
I applied the cartoonizer #1 and my image is ready.
The Photo Editor additionally includes
Textures
- Bokeh, scratches, light trails, light leaks
- Fabrics, grunge, paint, metal
- Bricks, paper
I will demonstrate an example with the current image – I will choose a fabric, let’s go with #2
But there is more
Overlays – but in a very creative way
- Winter holidays, alphabet, animals, floral
- Geometry, hearts, Earth’s day, Halloween
- St Patrick’s, Valentine’s, Numbers, Patterns
- Sports, Symbols
Let me think, yes I want the Cat..!
Another section inside the editor is the
Touch Ups
- Blemish fix, bronzer, blush, flash spot
- Clone, mascara, eye color, eye brighten
- Eyebrow pencil, fix redeye, lipstick, teeth whitening
- Hair color, reshape, slimming
Collage Maker
Templates
- Grid, a big photo wrap
- Facebook cover, Pinterest
… let’s create a Grid
I took the 16 photo pack and uploaded images from my previous posts. The app is very handy, you simply press on an area, add an image and there is the option to drag the image to the current spot you want.
I changed the background color to black.
You can set the spacing (mine is 10) and the corner rounding (here is 10)…What else should you need? All of that in a click of a mouse.
Image 05
Greetings Cards
- Father’s day, winter holidays, birthday
- Baby shower, Valentine’s, Mother’s
This is an excellent feature as you simply choose a preset, upload an image and let the app do the rest. Some Cards can include more photos and you can be as creative as you want.
Image 06
Another section is the
Patterns
- Retro, polka dots, Mosaic
- Floral, geometrical, heart, wavy
BeFunky is not just a photo editing app. Let’s create something from Scratch
The Designer section
Templates
- Greeting Cards, event graphics
- Small business, blogger resources
- Social media headers & graphics
- Blank templates
Design Elements
- Lines, arrows, ribbons
- Shapes, ornaments, badges
- Frames, infographics (small chunks)
- Wedding, baby shower, birthday
- Travel, food
- Social media, illustrations
Image 07
- Blank template, blue background, 4 infographic elements (boy, girl, 2 bars, circle)
- Illustrations (the butterfly), social media (a famous bird), Travel (the train)
- Birthday (2 balloons), wedding (the couple), frames (the yellow one)
- Ribbons (the grey), I added text and…
All the elements are editable so you can make your favourite changes. Of course, you can import any image into the palette. But I will use only BeFunky elements in order to be fair.
The mini-project is ready, I hope you like it
Save Function
You can save any project to
- Computer
- BeFunky
- Google drive
- Dropbox
When you upload an image you can use all of the above sources plus your Webcam
Mobile
The app is available for mobile and you can get it through “App Store” or “Google play”
Is there anything else in BeFunky? – Inspiration Resources
They say ..”Tutorials, tips, and tricks to spark your creativity..”
Topics like
- Tips for capturing Christmas holiday photos
- Designing dazzling blog post templates
- Grow your Instagram
- Create inspirational picture quotes
The blog is categorized so you can jump into any section you like
- Featured
- How-To
- What’s New
- Photo of the Day
I enjoyed the Photo of the Day department, a huge resource for inspiration
Among the authors, you can find
- Melanie Doncas (editor, founder of Whim Magazine)
- Marianne (solopreneur – Design your own blog)
- Lori Hil (freelance business & lifestyle blogger)
Case Studies
Some interesting topics
- Italian band TripleRock gets funky with their promotion strategy
- Va-Voom Vintage’s high-tech approach to old school fashion
- How Kristen Baumlier helps the community get funky with food.
- Doolittle jewelry puts their products in the right light with BeFunky
The Company members
- Tekin Tatar – CEO, founder
- Derric Hoffman – Product manager
- Azer Bulbul – Engineering director
- Rouli Willow – Lead UX / UI Designer
- Bjorn Ottesen – Lead interactive engineer
- Melissa Williams – Website engineer
- Janelle Albukhari – Content marketing manager
- Ian Hopkins – QA specialist
- Whitney Depaoli – Marketing assistant
- Alana McDonough – Office manager
Their Mission
To provide tools that are easy enough for anyone without expertise or technical skills to create beautiful photos and professional quality graphic designs.
- Be Open
- Effortless
- Creative
- Funky – don’t be afraid to go against conventional wisdom and be your own unique self
….So beautiful words
Story
in 2007 Tekin Tatar bootstrapped BeFunky with the help of friends and family. Their pioneer online photo editing tool garnered worldwide attention. Later that year, the company became a Tech Crunch Top 40 (out of 700 globally) and a spot on Digg website. Now over 25 million users enjoy the services of this unique application.
You can find Buzz and Rumours on their page from companies like
- Hongkiat
- The Washington Post
- C/Net
- Huffington Post
- CNBC
- New York times
- Tech blog
- Social Times
Employment – Careers
Current spots
Interactive developer – Action script – Portland
Benefits & Perks
Health benefits, 3 weeks paid time off, Tasty snacks and drinks, awesome co-workers, Custom photobooth in office, happy hours, lunches and more…
Pricing
The Basic membership is free for anyone and you have access to 125 digital effects and the photos can be exported with a maximum of 2500 x 2500 px resolution.
The Plus account costs only $24.95/year, almost $2 per month.Higher resolution (4000 x 4000 px) , expanded rights and features.
Final Take
I am super satisfied with the application. It runs faster than any other online app I have used so far.
The features include almost everything I need for my social media campaigns.
The effects are powerful and can transform images in a creative way.
The Layers Function is something you won’t meet elsewhere easily and can make a huge difference when you want to present special or unique artwork.
Additionally, there is a blog with valuable information, case studies, and other helpful material.
Related Resources
Other Free Design Tools
- DaButtonFactory
- Fotojet – Create Beautiful Collages
- Canva
- SmartGraphicCreator
- E-book cover creator
- Chartico
- Cooltext
- Picture Quote Maker
- Ribbet
- Snappa
- Online Logo Maker
I hope you enjoyed another design application. What are you waiting for? Jump into BeFunky and get started. As always, I’m looking forward to your comments and thoughts. Till next time.
Wow, this is amazing! Now I don’t have to worry about learning Photoshop anymore. Looks like this will be my new go-to photo editor! Tried it out after reading this, and I absolutely love it! So glad I came across this article. Just wanted to ask, is this in any way comparable to Pixlr photo editor? Have not tried that, but heard good reviews about it too.
I can understand your enthusiasm Raquel , this is one of the best applications in the market.I am glad you liked it.Now as concerns Pixlr , I have read positive reviews as well , but have not used it yet.
Thank you for your interest and I hope you will stay satisfied from BeFunky.
Is this photo editing tool really free? That’s great because it definitely saves having to buy Photoshop. Of course, Photoshop does a lot more than this, but many people will just want the basic functions. Being able to crop, resize, sharpen or change the color levels, those kinds of things are so common, it’s great that there is a free tool to do those things. But it looks like this tool does even more than that, so it’s almost a fully featured photo editor actually. Do you think you could produce professional results with this?
Absolutely Marcus , the results are professional.I am using BeFunky almost on a daily basis and I can tell that this application is the best so far I’ve used.
Additionally their offer tutorials and other tips on specific techniques.Lately I am trying to create a polyscape photo effect , by following their instructions.I hope I will be able to publish it by the end of this week.
Of course Photoshop can do way more things but considering its price a lot of people would be interested in BeFunky.
Not only you can crop , resize and change colours instantly but the layer function sets the application away from the competition.
Go ahead and use it , you won’t regret it , I am definite.All my best , thank you for coming back.
Wow! I’ve been searching for an “easy” image editor (preferably free!) and I find this. It looks absolutely perfect for what I need. Using your clear instructions I’m going to try it out for myself. Thank you for an excellent review and for showing me something I will make good use of.
Welcome Clare , I am so glad to find you satisfied with this resource.Absolutely , BeFunky is one of my Top of the Top online apps.You won’t regret it and it is easy to use.
Thank you for this visit and for your beautiful comments.Good luck with your new designs.
Tasos, you never cease to amaze me my dear friend.
You have done it again, taking me by complete surprise with another brilliant wealth of knowledge Blog Post. 😀
My my my, so much in awe, this is FREE?!? How could I have never heard about this until now.
Must definitely add it to my arsenal of online programs that are just too good NOT to have!
Can anything in life get better if it is NOT FREE? I don’t think so, nope not by a long stretch of the imagination that is.
Welcome back dear Angel , I am so glad that you are active and thank you so much for the great compliments.
Yes , BeFunky is free and this version has so many capabilities you won’t believe it is real.But sometimes there are exceptions to the rules.There are products “Too good to be True”.
Of course they offer a premium membership but you can test the free version for as long as you like.On top of that they are a very friendly company and will discuss with you any questions.
Thank once again for this visit and for your awesome participation in the comments.Go on and add BeFunky to your favourite list , you won’t regret it.You can make your images stand out of the crowd.All my best..
I’m going to want to check this out for sure. I love free online tools! And this sounds like a fun one too. High quality photo editing software can come at an astronomical price. After reading this, it seems that BeFunky Effects offer everything one would need to edit photos and more. Can’t wait to check out the collage maker.
Welcome to my blog Barb , you are absolutely right.Photo editing software is expensive in most cases and BeFunky comes as a solution.Even the free membership will take your photos into the next level and I am sure you will love all their effects and tools.
Thank you for visiting my site and for taking the time to drop by with your comment.Good luck with your designs and photos.
Hi Tassos, that seems like a great app to spice up my website! Thanks for all the examples, I love visual posts, I can see what BeFunky can do just by scrolling through your post. Of course if one is creative and has an artistic soul it will be so much easier for them to create powerful imagery with the app, but I’ll give it a go too, why not:) Where can I download it and how much does it cost?
Welcome Kams , I really love visual posts too and people are engaging with them on a pretty much higher ratio than with the traditional written content posts.Anyone can create beautiful effects with this app , it is so easy to use and fast that you won’t be disappointed.
It does not cost a dime , there is no software to download.You simply visit their website and get started right away.
Thank you for visiting my blog and for supporting the conversation.Good luck with your visual experiments.
I love BeFunky! I do some photography work on the side and this is what I use for editing photos. They come out perfectly.
One of my favorite things to do is adding some lip color with BeFunky. You can turn plain lips into holiday red ones! Another favorite is lightly adding the HDR effect. It gives a nice pop to any photo.
That is wonderful Gina , I am so glad you use and enjoy BeFunky for your photo projects.That trick on the lips is definitely something I want to try and the HDR effect sounds pretty useful.In fact all the features inside the app are great , it is like a toy for adults.
Thank you for this visit and for sharing your experience with this product.Good luck at whatever you do.