True Business- real life for small businesses

I’m a writer. I do words, innit. Pictures and graphics, however, are a magical world, into which my clumsy fingers have no right to delve. Still, I do occasionally have to mess about with photos, and luckily there is now a plethora of online graphics tools which mean I don’t have to buy expensive photo-editing software.

Since I’ve just had to do exactly that, I thought I’d share with you a few of the best freebies I’ve found online.

Photos

Sourcing photos is a doddle now, thanks mainly to the legend that is http://www.istockphoto.com/. Licensing isn’t free, but you do get a choice of millions of professional photos (and now video and flash animations, too). There’s also around 300,000 completely free piccies for your delectation at http://www.photoxpress.com/.

Editing

If you were born incapable of picking up anything more artistic than a crayon, have a go at any of the following easy picture manipulators; all of which can handle cropping, resizing and some basic effects:

http://www.picjuice.com/
http://www.drpic.com/ (effects are a bit hamfisted)
http://www.fotoflexer.com/
http://www.fixpicture.org/flash/
http://www.picnik.com/ (very slow to load)

But if you really want the daddy of online photo editing, let me recommend you to http://www.pixlr.com/. It’s amazingly fast (in fact it performs as well as desktop software), the photo processing algorithms are superb, and it comes with bags of filters and toys. I’m now a budding Michelangelo.

Special Mention

A special mention goes to http://www.reshade.com/. Resizing images is easy if you’re reducing the size of a picture, but usually goes horribly wrong if you’re trying to size a picture up. Reshade works some sort of digital magic to make upsized pictures still look as good as the original.