Image Editors

There are two key elements to an image editor for beginners. It should be free and it should be easy. They go together. Anything complicated enough to need directions is going to cost you quite a bit. Here are your options for editing images for your free website.

Paint

Use to create images from scratch, or for doing detailed pixel by pixel editing.

Paint is a modest program, but what it does, it does well and easily. I have experience with the Windows version, but all computers have some variation on it. If you need to create simple graphics, this is the program for you. If you want to generate something from scratch, you're probably stuck with Paint even if you want a complex image. Be sure to get used to the zoom features so you can edit it pixel by pixel on high magnification and switch back to see how it looks. Paint does not have a lot of fancy features, so any detail work you're going to do, you'll have to zoom in and out repeatedly as you're working to get decent results in a reasonable amount of time. (or even an unreasonable amount of time, depending on how much detailed and how large your image is.)

Google's Picasa2

Use to edit complex images or to perform complicated adjustments. (Does not create new images.)

Google offers a free image editor you can download at www.picasa.com. Picasa won't let you generate an image from scratch. However, it's far and away the most powerful and easiest image editor, you'll find. It has all kinds of very cool features, including organizing all your photos easily in thumbnails. You can make modifications to pictures that won't affect the original (the changes are saved as a special Picasa file), and you can save it to a new file when you have it the way you like it. All the features are very easy to understand. (The advanced features show you the effect they'll have right on the button!) The basic features even have Google's trademark "I'm Feeling Lucky" button which does quite a good job of correcting the things (especially lighting effects) that are obviously wrong, so that you don't have to figure it out.

The GORGEOUS part about Picasa2 however, is that everything is so easily reversible. As soon as you make any change an undo button becomes active. If you undo it, a redo button becomes active. Undo even remembers multiple effects forever. So if you punch "I'm Feeling Lucky", sharpen the image, and add a glow. Every time you start Picasa2, forever after, it will have those actions stacked in reverse order on the undo button so you can remove them. It's so easy, it's amazing. It's a better designed program than most expensive image editors.

Screen Shot Images (for Windows)

The difference between a professional looking page and a needlessly wordy one is sometimes just a picture. When you're specifically dealing with computer topics, you may be one screenshot away from a well designed page when you start trying to describe everything with text and completely screw things up. That Print Screen button may not seem like it does anything but if you set up the screen the way you want and press it, it saves the screen. (Alt+Print Screen grabs just the active window.) If you then open Word, Paint, or some other program, you can paste the screenshot in.