Does your WordPress theme need a little face lift? Want to make your site stand out from all the cookie cutter blog themes? We’re going to explore a tool today that will make it easy for you to put a little spark into your post images.

A new plugin called Get Post Image is packed full of special effects that you can use in your WordPress theme, including thumbnailing, formatting, masks, and logo insertion, and many more advanced features. Get Post Image is a wrapper for Get The Image WordPress plugin and phpThumb library. It’s easy one to overlook in the repository, because it has a simple name and no screenshots. However, if you visit the plugin’s homepage, you can see all of the exciting options it offers.

Some of the most impressive features include automatic saturation, brightness, and color adjustments, horizontal and vertical flipping, rounded corners, drop shadows, rotation and watermarking.

For example, let’s say you want to have all of your theme’s post thumbnails be rounded, you can add this using a simple tag:

<?php get_post_image ('w=200&amp;zc=1&amp;fltr[]=ric|100|100'); ?>

You can actually display images of any shape by creating a mask and referencing it in your tag, which would result in something like this:

Create a Shape Mask

The end result

<?php get_post_image ('w=200&amp;zc=1&amp;fltr[]=mask|'.STYLESHEETPATH.'/images/camel-logo-bw.png&amp;f=png'); ?>

How to Get Special Effects on Post Images

Step 1: Download and install Get The Image Plugin

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/get-the-image

Step 2: Download and install Get Post Image Plugin

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/get-post-image/

Step 3: Add the Tags to Your Theme

This plugin works mainly around the get_post_image() function and it must be used inside the loop.

Depending on what kind of effects you want to use, you’ll need to grab a tag similar to the examples in this post or create your own. You can see example tags at the plugin’s homepage. There are also many more examples on phpThumb Demo page. Use your imagination to make your WordPress theme stand out and have fun!