Free Software to Get Photos Ready for the Web
I did a little research of late looking for photo manipulation software that lets you quickly and easily do a lot of the standard manipulations needed to add a photo to your website. In addition to letting you crop and adjust colors and optimize file size for the web, I particularly wanted something that will let you crop to a specific size - say, 128 pixels by 324 pixels. That one was a killer requirement - it seems like an obvious need to me for almost any designed website, but very few tools let you do it.
But I found two great tools that really impressed me - and they're both free!
Picnik is an online photo manipulation tool that's impressively easy to use. It's very friendly and polished, and has a terrific cropping tool that not only lets you crop to a specific size, but gives you really nice "rule-of-thirds" cross-hairs, to help you create a composition that follows the typical advice to align it into thirds. You can easily add text or borders, and then save it off with useful optimizing functionality. It doesn't do vastly more than that - but that's a strength for folks who just want something simple and easy.
Paint.NET, a windows-only installed software package - is kind of a slimmed down Photoshop. Only free. It's suprisingly feature rich - it not only does all of the above, but has some nice features for controling layers and selections in a Photoshop-ish way. But without quite all of the bloat and confusion of Photoshop for those who need to just do simple things (don't get me wrong: I love Photoshop. But it can be baffling to those who aren't familiar with it).
But I found two great tools that really impressed me - and they're both free!
Picnik is an online photo manipulation tool that's impressively easy to use. It's very friendly and polished, and has a terrific cropping tool that not only lets you crop to a specific size, but gives you really nice "rule-of-thirds" cross-hairs, to help you create a composition that follows the typical advice to align it into thirds. You can easily add text or borders, and then save it off with useful optimizing functionality. It doesn't do vastly more than that - but that's a strength for folks who just want something simple and easy.
Paint.NET, a windows-only installed software package - is kind of a slimmed down Photoshop. Only free. It's suprisingly feature rich - it not only does all of the above, but has some nice features for controling layers and selections in a Photoshop-ish way. But without quite all of the bloat and confusion of Photoshop for those who need to just do simple things (don't get me wrong: I love Photoshop. But it can be baffling to those who aren't familiar with it).
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7 Comments:
Another option is Aviary (http://aviary.com/home). New, extremely innovative, with a basic free plan that's probably feature-equivalent to Picnik (premium, which includes private fiels and collaboration, unlimited disk space is only $25/yr). This one is getting rave reviews.
Yeah, it's really polished, and I can imagine a lot of things it's really good at, but this was one of the ones that doesn't seem to allow any way to crop to a particular size - to easily crop something down to fit in my 137px by 234px thumbnail slot?
Unless I'm missing it?
The GIMP is the open-source alternative to photoshop. Very feature rich, slightly clunky UI. But free as in both beer and freedom.
I've also used XNView (freeware, not open-source, windows only) as a handy quick-and-dirty tool. Again, not the world's greatest UI, but really works well for quick stuff.
And of course one of the many reasons I like to use Plone for building websites is that it has an excellent image editing add-on product (ImageEditor) that pretty much eliminates most day-to-day need for separate image editing software. :-)
I thought Gimp should be mentioned. Closer to Photoshop in terms of "bloat" and ease of use. But it's powerful, free and cross platform.
From the menu, Image/Crop Selection. The guides can let you set an exact size. The editor is speedy, too.
don't forget the granddaddy of them all, GIMP. Open source photoshop... not brain dead simple, but easy enough. http://www.gimp.org/
I am using GIMP as alternative to photoshop. But I've also used Paint.NET for another option.
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