I was reading one of my favorite photo blogs today, ScottKelby.com (who, by the way, is also a great book writer) and saw his post on a really great tool/time killer. It allows you to upload an image of yourself and in a few easy steps create a Simpson character that looks just like you.

It does a suprisingly good job doing some auto-recognition of hair color, length, etc. and let’s you do some tweaking on your own. Check out Scott’s blog on the topic for some tips on formatting your photo and then go to the Simpsonizer.

A few things they didn’t mention though, are that it works best if you can remove all the background from the photo. If there isn’t enough contrast, it tends to error out. Also, when I exported my final result, I had to add a .png extension (otherwise it wouldn’t save at all). It didn’t give the option to choose an extension, which I felt was odd, but I am also working on Windows Vista, so others’ experiences may differ. One way cool thing though is that by saving it as a .png it set it with a transparent background which made it much easier to create the family collage!