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If you’re like me, you have no clue how to enhance a photo. I know I want my pictures to look better but I don’t really know how to achieve that—I just know what it looks like. This is where befunky comes in! It’s a one-click photo enhancer that is insanely easy to use.
Easy photo enhancer and editor
When it comes to making pictures look good, I need help. While I actually have some skills at special effects-type editing (morphing one person’s face onto another person’s head, or making someone look like they’re holding a turkey leg instead of a pen), I do not have a good eye at all for making ordinary pictures look better.
I have folders and folders of pictures on my computer that I never used for anything because they’re blah. I used to pay for two online photo editors, and I was just flushing that money down the toilet, because when I tried to fix things myself they looked unnatural.
Then, a couple of years ago, I did a sponsored post for a one-touch photo enhancer I’d never heard of, called befunky. It’s a bit of a silly name, I know. But don’t let that fool you: this is serious photo editing software.
After I was done working with befunky, I became a paying customer, because I just couldn’t give it up!
befunky does all of the things you would expect from an online photo editor (and does them WELL!), but what makes it stand out from other photo editing sites is its auto photo enhancer. With just one click, befunky is making my photos so much better than I ever could have on my own.
Auto-enhance photos four different ways
The four different befunky photo enhancers can be found in the online photo editor in the “edit” tab on the left side of the screen, in a box that says “Enhance DLX.” Between them they can tackle the most common photo problems, like low exposure, dullness, blurry images, and noise.
All four of the effects can work with just one click, and the software will analyze your picture and apply the effects the best way it knows how (that’s what I’ve done for three of the four examples below). Or, you can play around with individual settings (but you don’t have to, which is great for people like me).
The @befunky online photo editor can fix many of the most common image problems with one click!Examples of the online photo enhancer tool
You can absolutely use more than one of the Enhance DLX features on a photo, but I wanted to show you what they could each do on their own.
HDR DLX
High Dynamic Range (HDR) is a layering technique used in photography to…make pictures look better? I’m not a real photographer! I don’t know how to do it! What I do know is that our eyes can adapt to a wide range of lights and darks better than a camera can. That’s why sometimes I look at a spectacular scene and take a picture, and the picture looks dull and flat in comparison to what I’m actually seeing.
I was walking in lower Manhattan one day and turned a corner, and was struck by what I saw: the clouds were beautiful, and the reflections in the glassy buildings were dramatic. So naturally, I whipped out my cell phone and took a picture.
But when I got home and looked at the image on my computer, I was not impressed. The whole scene was dull. The reflections on the buildings weren’t as striking as I remembered, and the buildings on the sides of my photo were dark.
How to enhance a photo
Check out what happened when I uploaded that picture to the befunky photo editor and clicked on HDR DLX:
I can see more detail in the dark buildings and the side of the truck, the reflections in the buildings show up much better, and the clouds are how I remember them!
That was all with one click. And it didn’t make anything that was already bright too bright, which is what happens when I try to lighten photos up on my own. The HDR DLX effect knows which parts of a photo need to be enhanced, and leaves the other parts alone.
Great uses for the HDR DLX effect are landscapes, portraits taken in sunlight where there are lots of shadows on the face, scenes without enough light, and scenes that are backlit.
Sharpen DLX
It can be painful to get home, start flipping through your photos, and discover that something you thought was good was actually blurry.
Or, in the case of the pictures I took on the Cave of the Winds tour in Niagara Falls a couple of years ago, I knew that my pictures would be blurry, because in order to get up close and personal with the falls I had to put my cell phone in a plastic bag. That doesn’t make for the best pictures.
But sharpening photos can be difficult, because it can make them look extremely fake and processed.
Sharpening works by trying to identify the edges in your image, and manipulates the lights and darks at the edges to make them look sharper. But if the program treats all edges the same, you get a weird fake looking picture with highlights that are way too bright and darks that are too dark.
How to enhance a blurry photo
The Sharpen DLX effect in befunky analyzes the edges and determines whether they’re hard or soft, and treats them accordingly so that you get a more natural look.
One click with the Sharpen DLX button, and I could see details in the water and rocks! And if I’d known those wet people in the picture, I probably would have been happy to see more detail there, too.
The Sharpen DLX effect is useful for low-light shots, moving shots, and images that have a lot of texture. Or, you know, when your camera is in a plastic bag.
Vibrant Colors DLX
Here’s where I really get myself into trouble: my answer to dull pictures is cranking the saturation level up to 11. That’s why so many of my old food photos look terrible.
This is a photo (on the left) that I took of some French Toast I’d made (it had Nutella and bananas in it, it was amazing!), and then on the right is what I posted to Instagram after boosting the saturation and brightness with my usual editor:
The bananas are way too bright and the strawberries don’t look right, but I posted it anyway because it looked better than the original, which was dull.
How to boost color the right way
Here’s what happened when I uploaded the original to befunky and clicked the Vibrant Colors DLX button:
The bananas are yellower, the strawberries are brighter, even the grass showing through the holes in the table is greener. But most importantly, it doesn’t look like I messed with it!
Denoise DLX
The last effect helps to take away the graininess in photos and smooth things out. Maybe you took a picture of a really dark sky and it looks grainy. Or in the case of this photo, it just looks harsh – it’s hard to look at.
I don’t remember what I was trying to do to those cherries that day (candy them?), but both the recipe and the photo were a failure.
How to smooth out harsh or grainy photos
But using the Denoise DLX effect, the image is softer and prettier!
This time I didn’t just hit one button and leave it, I also went into the Denoise settings and lowered the “Fine Details” setting to zero, to get things just a bit smoother.
A befunky photo with multiple enhancements
This was a picture I took on my cell phone a couple of weeks ago when the sky was about to open up. There’s nothing wrong with the picture, it’s just dull. Just because the weather was dull doesn’t mean the picture had to be.
I used three out of the four one-click photo enhancers on it, and here’s how it turned out:
The great thing about the bottom image is that it’s still a picture of a dull, dreary day. Enhancing the photo didn’t change the mood or make it unnaturally bright. But now the colors pop, and you can see more detail! And it took less than a minute.
I truly believe that this is the best way to enhance photos if you don’t know what you’re doing. And if you do know what you’re doing, you’ll get granular control!
Download the befunky editor
I urge you to try befunky out for yourself. The four Enhance DLX effects I talked about require a befunky Plus Account, which is just $4.99 a month when you sign up for a year.
In addition to the Enhance DLX tools, the befunky Plus account also gives you the ability to:
- remove objects from photos
- remove backgrounds from photos
- make great collages with the Collage Wizard
- blur backgrounds
- touch up portraits
- reshape objects
- batch edit
- design with templates
Not sure if you want it? You can try the effects out on your photos for free with a Basic account and see how well they work, and then if you want to apply the effects you can get a befunky Plus Account!
Check out some more images I fixed with the befunky Photo Enhancer. I can’t stress to you how quick and easy the process was!