What You Can Do With Web2.0 Photo Editors

Since my old PC packed a sad, I’ve been bereft of Photoshop, a tool that I used a lot for preparing pictures on this blog. I’ve been forced to find other means to create and edit images.

This weekend I did a bit of experimenting and research, with various Web2.0 image editors, all of which offer wonderful editing features. During my searches, I recalled a post on screen capture applications Sue Waters wrote some time last year.

I was gobsmacked when I found she had asked me some questions in a later comment on that post that I’d never seen and of course never answered! It just goes to show how things can be missed in conversation.

Today’s post on photo editors is by way of my humble apology to
Sue Waters and a reply to her 8 month old question on MWSnap.



MWSnap

This cool tool allows any image viewed on the screen to be snapped and cropped at the same time. It has additional facilities to save in a range of different file formats, gif and jpeg to TNG and TIFF.


For instance, by simply opening an already saved gif image in MWSnap it can be converted and saved as a jpeg image. I found this feature very useful.


When I need to edit a gif image in Picasa 3, which only accepts jpeg files, I open it in MWSnap and use Save as with the jpeg option.

MWSnap also has other simple features, including adding a border with a range of useful colours and styles that can be customised.
All the pictures shown on this post were fitted with matching borders in MWSnap before uploading.


MWSnap has no text facility. For this I can use Picasa 3 or Paint.

Picasa 3

Picasa 3 is a free Google photo editor and viewer. It is also the default picture editor in Flickr. Picasa 3 offers a rich range of most often needed image editing tools.

Among its useful features are cropping, straightening (useful for sorting crooked pictures) a red-eye removal device, brightness/contrast adjustment as well as colour and colour density adjustment, and a simple easy to use text writer.


The text writing features that impressed me most were the ability to rotate text and to adjust the text font and size, while also relocating the text before locking.

Picasa 3 also has a facility to adjust text transparency, style and alignment. I find this handy.



10 other Web2.0 apps

In my inevitable panic to find easy-to-use image editors, I came across this wonderful post on Daily Gyan that listed another 10 great online photo editors. Check them out.

For anyone who is looking for a tool that is more like the professional ones, I'd advise having a look at Splashup. It comes with a high recommendation from the team at Gyan.


Creativity

I’m a great believer in the suck-it-and-see approach to using computers. I recommend you should try this as a first approach before looking around and asking for advice or searching for a training clip on Google unless you are an absolute beginner.

I'm not knocking asking for advice though. Use everything at your disposal, including, taking time to think through different ways to do things. That’s what I did to get the illustrations for this post.

Though some of the images may not be edited in the most artistic way,
I hope they serve their purpose and inspire others to do better.