It's Diptictastic.

Folks, it's happened.

The fine folks who brought us the Diptic app have combined two of my greatest loves: documenting my child and not using Photoshop or GIMP.

What's Diptic, you ask? It's a photo manipulation program that lets the user resize, colorize, collage, and border images together. You know, the kind of thing that takes me a good weekend in Photoshop and GIMP. (And the kicker is- I know how to use those programs! Kind of.) Turns out, flicking an image bigger or smaller on one's iPhone or iPad is more my speed. I had a feeling.

My first attempt was nothing to write home about. Unless you're writing home about the cutest toddler, EVER. I pasted and resized two pix of Nora's that I really dug- and was stalling on cropping, editing, etc., for printing out. It took me three minutes on my phone.

Here's what I got: super cute big pic, super cute small pic. Dust bunnies and uneven paint cropped out. Zoom in on that toothy grin. Border it in grey. Brighten it up a tad (and pretend the "natural" light wasn't a rather yellow foyer jobbie.)

Pretty cute, also pretty mug-shotesque.

Next I put a skinny pic of a field (taken by my youngest sister Em- photographer extraordinaire) with a recent photo from our neighborhood playlot park. It was the first really spring-like day in Chicago and we both had a raging case of Spring fever. I like the image of the sunny field against a picture of my daughter, moments before she happily slumped to the ground to rest in a pile of wood chips. Brought out the green in both pix and adjusted the lighting a tad. Gave it the slightest of Spring green borders and ta-da. 

I'm sure people could easily find ways to take more advantage of this software- it's kind of like I borrowed a rocket ship to go to Taco Bell.

There's also a cheap upgrade to more- and customizable- photo layouts, but I dig the six offered ones.  And I cannot stress enough how ridiculously easy this stuff is. I take pictures of Nora all day long on my phone- and now it's cinchy to create a new pic and upload it to Flickr, Facebook or Posterous. 

Word on the street is that one can use it for non-kiddo photos, too.

Like I even know what those are anymore.