A closer look at 5 photo editing tools mentioned in this month’s Campus Technology article, “The Super-Secret, Never-Before-Revealed Guide to Web 2.0 in the Classroom“.
I read this article this week, and there is a section in it entitled “4 Itty-Bitty Content Tools“, which in turn has a subsection titled “Become An Image Editor”. They mention five photo editing tools in this section, but don’t go into a lot of detail about them. I sat down this weekend and took most of them for a trial run. Here’s what I learned.
Pixenate
This tool has features like “red eye reduction”, “normalize” (improve color balance), “fill light” (lighten entire pic), “whiten teeth” (although I found the result a little overdone in the example I tested), and “colors tool” (lets you change brightness, saturation, and hue). But the real fun here is the “fun effects”, such as Lomo (add a soft, dark halo around photo), speech bubbles, snowflakes, a filtering tool, and more. You can order prints and products like t-shirts, mugs, etc., that incorporate your masterpiece.
Wet Floor Maker
This tool “turns your photos into cool reflecting images” - you can choose which axis to reflect on, the degree of reflection, and other options. This is a neat idea, but the end result is a small low-res image, and I don’t see any option to let you get a larger end product.
Mypictr
This applet lets you upload a picture, select a section of it using a presized frame, then save it or email it. The idea is to give you a very easy way to create a profile picture for social networks, but you can do this very easily using Paint on a PC (and I believe Mac Picture Editor is the equivalent on the Mac).
Roundpic
Roundpic automatically rounds the edges of a picture, but it’s limited to 1 MB pictures. It also doesn’t appear to offer any control over the way the rounding effect is applied. Pixenate does the same thing but provides some control over the degree of rounding, and also let’s you fill the corners with color. You can actually create a multi-layered corner look by applying the technique a couple times.
Picasa
Google’s photo editing and management tool offers functionality well beyond those cited above, and it is free, but it has to be downloaded and installed. In addition to photo enhancement features, Picasa also let’s you share photos online, create online photo albums, and more. Of course, there are also options to order products that incorporate your photos. If you work with photos a lot, Picassa is probably worth downloading and setting up. To learn more about it, click here.
Video blog entry for this post
In this video I briefly look at each of these 5 tools online.
Conclusions
You can do a lot of what some of these tools do using Paint in Windows or the included photo editing tools on the Mac. That being said, some of the tools above go well beyond Paint. Of these tools, Pixenate was a stand out to me - it provided unique and useful functionality, and is well worth being aware of and taking for a spin yourself!. There are many more free photo editing tools out there on the web, I think I’ll try a few more out next week.
Comments welcomed!
I’d love to hear about your experiences with tools like these, so feel free to weigh in about those you’d like to recommend, or offer any comments you might wish to make about the tools we’ve discussed here. Thanks!
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