Image and Photo Effects on the Cheap (Free!)
I've been expanding my graphic design skills quite a bit lately. I was under the impression that I'd need to spend a lot of money to do cool things with my photos or to create images for websites. Au contraire! Here are some examples of FREE ways to do cool things with photos and images:
I created this one at DUMPR . They have a wide selection of free effects you can use, and you can upgrade to a paid membership for even more. They allow you to save to your pc or post to numerous social networking platforms like Facebook, MySpace, Flikr, Picasa and more.
I created this adorable image at PhotoFunia . They don't offer all the posting features, but they are totally free, and they have some darned cool effects that put your image into the context of another such as a Wanted Poster, or Art Gallery Wall. I had a lot of fun with this one - it's great for making custom greeting cards for your friends!
Picnic lets you upload your own image or import one from Flikr, Facebook, MySpace, Photobucket, Picasa etc. There are a few cool effects such as the one above, and they also have some free Photo fixing tools on the site too for adjusting colors, cropping, removing red-eye etc.
More Invaluable Free Tools
The Jing Project is pretty neat for a few reasons. There's a tool that sits on your desktop. You can use it to select a section of your screen and then capture an image or make a screencast (including audio). It will then save the capture to a local folder, network drive, screencast.com, flikr, ftp server or the clipboard. It's somewhat of a LITE version of Snagit or Camtasia that I've found fairly invaluable. One caveat - I've learned to NOT leave Jing open on the desktop constantly as my system resources seem to climb over time when I do so.
Google refers to this app as "the software that should have come with your camera." It's pretty easy to use and fairly robust for a free program. It will instantly scan your computer for photo content. It has some great basic photo fixes as well as cool visual effects. You can also create captions for the photos. It also makes slideshows for you and of course, if you have Picasa web space, it makes it simple to get your photos there.
The GNU Image Manipulation Program is a raster graphics editor similar to Photoshop or Paintshop Pro. While it does have useful features for editing existing images, it's real sauce is in its ability to generate logos and graphics, combine images, convert image formats and create animated gifs. I don't do enough graphic manipulation to justify the cost of Photoshop, but GIMP is absolutely a suitable replacement for my use. It's also available in multiple OS flavors (Unix, Mac OS, Windows), making it an invaluable tool for me, since I have machines running all three. Here is a list of it's main caveats.
Being a .NET developer, I couldn't end this post without mentioning Pain.NET. Of course, it's developed on the .NET platform, but that's not all that makes it cool. The source is available to the community, which is one thing I did. It functions much like Corel Paintshop Pro, which I've always liked. The interface is intuitive. It supports pretty fancy effects and does everything I would expect a basic image editor to do. It's definitely worth a look-see.
So as you can see, there really is no reason to go spend a fortune to do cool things with your photos and images. Using these tools, most people can accomplish quite a bit on the cheap!
(edited 9/15/08)
Artweaver is a freeware graphics editor that seems to try to be more like Photoshop than others. The toolbars are similar, and it operates much the same as one would expect Photoshop to operate. There are brushes available, and it seems to be a pretty good proggie!
8.09.2008 at 1:43 PM