I wanted to be a card game designer. It was either that, or a technology geek, or a race car driver ("race cars" are the things people raced before NASCAR).

You know what card games I mean, those annoyingly complex collectible card games. Made popular by Wizards of the Coast, the fad started out with "Magic: The Gathering" and lead to "Pokémon" and gazillions of others. A game freak myself, I fell in love with Magic, as it allowed you to customize your own game every time you played, and trade unique cards with other players. A young me, still powered by enthusiastic if naive optimism, started working. Hours per day were spent designing the game's rules and components. Creating countless versions of my game angered the printer gods, as my printer sucked dry all ink cartridges within fifty miles.

The game cards had to be in color and printed on quality equipment. I called various printing companies and priced out what it took to create a deck of cards. Around that time, I realized that the effort it took to create a game wasn't worth the enjoyment of playing it. That probably said more about my game than the card game industry.

Realizing a career in game designing took too much effort, I decided it'd be easier to become a computer and networking consultant. (Turns out, the joke's on me – consulting is kinda hard, too.)

Then I found the "Trading Card Maker". This is a great online playing card creation tool. Give it a picture and some text, and the free web utility gives you a very professional graphic of a playing card. Print it out at home. Repeat a few dozen times, come up with some rules, roll a few dice, and presto: You've created your own game!

Check out the other handy editing and special effects utilities for your digital pictures. No need to special-order calendars with family pictures – create your own online. Your only job is to print it out.

Create realistic-looking magazine covers and movie posters, too. Add pizzazz to a wall with a motivational poster. Or customize the text and make it a funny de-motivational poster. Some of the tools allow you to purchase the final creation for as little as $10.

If you don't want to be fancy and just need free photo editing software, it's available. You'll get handy and often-used digital editing techniques, like red-eye reduction, cropping, rotation, zooming, sizing, color adjustments, and other basic effects.

Both sites survive on ads displayed as you use the tools, but the resulting pictures they generate are ad-free.

Sure, some of these techniques are easy to do yourself with the right software. But for those who don't have the tools on their PC, or want to create quick and effortless material from digital photos, these are for you.

The "Trading Card Maker" could've put me in a new career by now. I regret not finishing my own collectible card game. But I'll always have the memories: "Thunder Chicken" has a warm place in my heart.