Wherever I go, I take my camera and whenever I find time, I play with my pictures by editing, cropping, adding effects, frames and funky additions, where needed.

Gone are the days when you needed to have special skills in photo editing software to ‘play’ with photos — along with many software which let you add effects with a click, you have many free services available on the net as well. They not only allow you to edit pictures, some even let you save it to their cloud, i.e. their online storage. What is common in all is that they are fun to use. One of such free sites is www.befunky.com — one-stop photo editing services for children and adults alike.

Open the site and upload your picture by browsing your hard disk or from your profiles on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.

You can also click a fresh one with your webcam, if available. Once the picture is uploaded, the left side panel comes in to serve: edit, effects, artsy, frames, text, goodies, etc.

Each of these categories contains a small world of wonders in it. For example, the most familiar of the categories, ‘edit’ lets you crop, sharpen, saturate, rotate, resize, smoothe, matte (the list long goes on) your pictures. In effects, there are amazing effects that you can use on the picture, e.g. setting picture in sepia tone; whereas, in Artsy, you can bring out the artist inside you by adding effects of cartooniser, sketch, oil painting, water colour, inkify and others.

You also have a vast array of frames to choose from, and you can also put text in the picture.

Having visited many sites I find the category ‘goodies’ different. For instance, you are given a long list to choose from: monsters, florals, animals, back-to-school, babies, shapes, stickers, music, speech bubbles and patriotic along with many others.

Befunky is overflowing with photo-editing effects, so take the funky wand this weekend and make something really nice for your mom, dad, your grandparents or your siblings… and prove your creativity. — Aamir Raz Soomro