But photo editing doesn’t have to be frustrating, as Adobe, Universitatea Princeton si Universitatea Washington got together to research special image editing algorithms of the future, called ‘structural image editing’. I’m not that good at explaining new technologies so if you want more info you can read about structural image editing here or watch the video below that better explans how work will be done in future Adobe Photoshop versions:

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Picnik

http://www.picnik.com is the first website that captured my attention because you don’t even have to create an account to modify a picture. You simply access the website, upload the picture you want to modify, by clicking the Upload button and in a few seconds you’ll have it ready to process. From this out, only your imagination and aesthetic sense will dictate, because in rest, you have at hand a lot of effects like black and white on the picture or just on part of the picture, sepia, pixelation etc., you can modify color characteristics, contrast, you can take-off red eye in a portrait photo etc. Then you can apply a lot of writings, photo frames and decalcomania picture with all kinds of stuff. You can even whiten someone’s teeth in a picture.

Picnik photo editing website

All effects that I’ve mentioned can be found on the Create tab, not on the Edit one. Of course, there is the AutoFix function that only adjusts luminosity and contrast and it actually makes it pretty well. After you’ve finished processing a photo you can save it back on your hard disk. If you want to keep a copy on the website, they invite you to create an account in order to have them there every time you access the website. Some of the processing functions and effects can be found on the Premium category, which means you have to pay so you can use them, but I haven’t seen anything indispensable. I’ve liked this website the most, because it’s really user-friendly. And if you create an account, you can upload on Picnik any picture you have on those accounts where you keep pictures, such as myspace, flickr, facebook etc.

Advantages: easy and likable to use, has a lot of effects and options
Disadvantages: not all of them are free

FotoFlexer

www.fotoflexer.com doesn’t look that good graphically, meaning the website wants to look like a desktop software. All tools are militarily disposed, in order of utility and importance. The creators rave about FotoFlex, as if it is the coolest online website in this domain. Uploading your photo is made just as on Picnick, only a little bit slower. It puts up a menu that shows you it’s trying hard to join resources and other stuff. It took about 10 seconds before the picture was ready to process. The same thing happens when you want to save it. Admittedly, on FotoFlexer absolutely everything is free and also has some pluses for pros: working with layers and animations adding.

FotoFlexer is a nice alternative

The utilization is a little bit more complex, and the effects apply pretty intense. You must pay attention at their quantum. In another train of thoughts, nobody forces you to get into complicated things. You have the Basic tab for the main characteristics of the picture settings, and of course, Auto Fix. On FotoFlexer, you can also process pictures from another accounts of online photo album.

Advantages: everything is free and you have a bunch of options and effects
Disadvantages: pretty hard to use

Adobe Photo Express

Did you know that Adobe also has a free online photo editor? It’s called Adobe Photoshop Express, and you can find it at here and you must create an account to use it. I’ve heard it only works in the USA, but I’ve managed to create an account without any problems. After doing this, either you mention the accounts where from you want to take the pictures to process (Flickr, Facebook, Picasa or Photobucket), or you upload them directly from the hard disk, as I did.

Adobe Photoshop Express looks nice

Pictures will appear somewhere on the upside of the window, and below them there’s a menu that gets you to the Edit function. Big disappointment over here. You can only play with some basic effects, color adjustment, distort…pretty empty. Even though the website looks pretty professional and aesthetic, the content is mediocre. Of course, for a basic process you don’t need much, but after creating an account and confirming it, I was expecting something more spectacular, more complex.

Advantages: good for basic process, re-dimensioning, luminosity, color and contrast adjustments
Disadvantages: you have to create an account, there are a few tools you can access

I’ve only given you a few ideas about how to modify online a picture in a few seconds. Happy? Good luck and keep up the good work! Disappointed? Check out the free image processing software I’ve described over here or go for a more advanced photo management software.

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The Photoshop tool bar

It’s enough to know and understand a few image editing concepts and you can edit your own images for your blog. Today I’m gonna try and explain to you three concepts that will help you get a right sized image for your posts.

Resize

On yout computer screen image dimensions are expressed in pixels or px (small individual sqares, each of a special color). Let’s suppose your blog has a text column 400 pixels wide and you want to put a picture in a post that’s 1200 px wide. Your WordPress blog can resize it for you and link to the bigger image, but that ain’t gonna look good plus it will take more space on your precious hosting server.

What happens when you use a resize tool? In the example above each three pixels of the original image are squized into a single pixel and the color il calculated as a mean of the three initial pixels. If you get the options of resizing the image using a resample algoritm (look for this option in the Resize tool you use) you better check it as the resized image will look better. Also remember to keep the aspect ratio if you don’t want the resulting image to look distorted.

A smaller image will also have the advantage of occupying less space, if the resize length and width are smaller than the original size of the image.

Crop

This is a slightly different concept that will also make your resulting image smaller. A crop tool will allow you to select a portion of the image and crop to that selection (resulting image will contain only the pixels inside the selection). This is an useful tool when the initial image contains things you’re not interested in. If your tool has the option of specifying a size (width and height) for the crop area and you set those value the program you’re using will crop the pixels in the selection you provide and then apply a resize algorithm to the dimensions you specify (you got it, this is a two step operation).

Crop doesn’t have to be proportional and the resulting image won’t be distorted.

Canvas size

I’ve left this concept at the end as it’s a little bit more complicated to explain. Imagine you have a picture, 100 x 100 pixels, and you need more space in the left side to put some text there. By using the Canvas size tool you’ll be able to extend the working area of the picture in any direction by any size you want. The additional space will be filled with a color you choose in the tool’s options. In the resulting space, if you’ve increased it you’ll find all the graphic contents of the original picture.

Canvas tools also can be used to decrease the working area of the picture, but be careful, all information outside the resulting working area is lost. Decreasing canvas size is usually used when you want to eliminate unused space in an image and keep the rest of the pixels untouched.

That’s it for now. If you want to read about other image edition functions please state their names in the comment form below and I’ll try and explain them in future posts.

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