One of my goals is to learn how to do really awesome things with Photoshop. Well, this week I did not learn how to do that. Nope, I did not learn how to do awesome things with Photoshop. I didn't even learn how to do crappy things with Photoshop.

I did, though, learn something kind of close — to the awesome, not the crappy.

What I learned this week was how to make "gooey" photos, not using Photoshop, but using Creative Kit. And it's super easy. And super silly. And, to be honest, super time-sucking fun.

Creative Kit, a Google product, was added to Picasa, the Google photo manager I — and many others — use to store and sometimes tweak photos. I recently found that the tweaking is even better when using Creative Kit (which replaced the former editing software, Piknik). In particular, I now no longer have to store in Picasa but upload to PicMonkey when I want to do something extra special.

Something extra special I don't typically do, like going gooey. For example, this photo of Andrea and her boyfriend, looking just a wee bit happier than they do in real life, after I used the "gooify" function in Creative Kit on their smiles:

girlfriend and boyfriend

As those two are all gooey about one another in real life, maybe the following would be a better example of what can be done with Creative Kit.

The first photo below is one of Jim and me, just being normal (well, as normal as Jim gets). The second is us looking far more interesting than we typically do, thanks to getting gooey and bearded and more:

married couple

gooey couple

Get this: You, too, can make friends and family far more interesting in Picasa, thanks to the Creative Kit option. (And, no, this is not a sponsored post.) It's located in Picasa as shown in the first photo; the second photo shows some of the fun things you'll find:

Picasa screenshot creative kit screenshot