Blogging Pilot's Pilog

I am sure that we can all agree that there is really no absolute alternative to Adobe Photoshop, but sometimes we just don’t need a million tools to simply edit a picture for a blog post. Agreed that Adobe Photoshop can edit a picture at the pixel-level, but do we really need that for editing pictures for blogging purposes? Sometimes, simple and one click edit is better, and let’s spend more time on the content than the aesthetics of a Blog.

Keeping all this in mind, Pilotology.com brings you the Top 10 Picture Editing tools, and they are all Freeware and / or Open Source!

Windows Live Photo Gallery

With Windows Live Photo Gallery, it’s a snap to get your photos and videos from your camera to your PC. Find your favorite photos and share them with friends and family. Make your great photos look even better, and create impressive panoramic photos too.

Editing features include adjusting exposure, color, or detail by hand, or use auto adjust. You can even create mesmerizing panoramas—Photo Gallery stitches several photos together in just one click. Browsing feature by date, caption and tagging people are some of the cool feature you would like to check out.

IrfanView

IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 , 2008, Vista, Windows 7. Simple for the newbie, but powerful for the professional. Many supported file formats, Multi language support, Thumbnail/preview option, Paint option – to draw lines, circles, arrows, straighten image etc., Toolbar skins option, Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD) and lot more features.

Paint.NET

Paint.NET, originally intended to be an alternative to Microsoft Paint, but soon with its highlighting features it ruled and became one of the best tool to crop images, rotate, adjust colors, resize, make collages and many more. All feature and user interface element are designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable without assistance. You’d love it’s special effects that offers everything from blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise, and embossing. Also included is a unique 3D Rotate/Zoom effect that makes it very easy to add perspective and tilting.

Picasa

Picasa is free photo editing software by Google that makes your pictures look great, make sharing pictures with family and friends a breeze, and editing a piece of cake. Together, Picasa & Picasa Web Albums make it easy for you to organize and edit your digital photos, then create online albums to share with friends, family & the world. Some of the exciting features include, edit to perfection, get organized, be creative, add places, and simple sharing. The feature I love the most is that the Web Album allows you to post your photos online.

FastStone Image Viewer

FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image converter, editor and browser. It does carry amazing array of features, which includes image viewing, comparison, cropping, managing, red-eye removal, renaming, add texts, watermarks, emailing, border effects, color adjustments and many more.

Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more.

Apple iPhoto

iPhoto makes managing your photos as easy as taking them. It helps you organize your photos so you can find them fast, edit them so they look their best, and share them with your friends and family. Further iPhoto gives you more ways to keep track of your photos by organizing them according to who’s in your pictures, where you took them, and when you took them. Places to go, event to remember and experiment with effects are some of the cool features you must have a look.

iPhoto introduces Faces: a new feature that automatically detects and even recognizes faces in your photos. iPhoto uses face detection to identify faces of people in your photos and face recognition to match faces that look like the same person.

XnView

XnView is a fast multi-format graphics browser, viewer, and converter. It can read more than 400 file formats, e.g. GIF, BMP, JPEG, PNG, TARGA, multipage TIFF, camera RAW, JPEG 2000, MPEG, AVI, Quicktime. EXIF & IPTC metadata are also supported. The image viewer has an Explorer-like browser that allows quick and simple browsing of directory contents. XnView supports red eye correction, crops and transforms JPEG images losslessly, generates HTML pages and contact sheets, and provides batch conversion and batch renaming. Slide shows with transitions effects, screen capturing, WIA & TWAIN support (scanner & digital cameras), image comparison, file operations.

PicaJet Photo Organizer

PicaJet Photo Organizer automatically manages 1000’s of digital photos in seconds. Photo indexing is faster than in other competitive products. PicaJet allows you to selectively index folders or files at any time, review and edit photos as desired, without pigeonholing you into an awkward interface structure. You can create highly complex category structures or simple ones. It is up to you and depends entirely on your needs and not on any program limits.

GIMP

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a nice distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. It is a powerful piece of software with capabilities not found in any other free software product. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert-quality photo-retouching program, an online batch-processing system, a mass production image renderer, or an image-format converter. GIMP is modular, expandable, and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything.

Abobe Photoshop Elements

Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 software combines power and simplicity so you can make your photos look extraordinary, share your life stories in unique print creations and web experiences, and easily manage and protect all your photos and video clips. Exciting features of this software would include, Recompose photos to any size — without distortion, Easily manage everything from one convenient place, Quickly find your best photos, and many more.

Tags: photo, picture effects, pictures

Ever thought about how to add a thumbnail picture with a Polaroid effect, and a drop shadow effect, and a tilt effect to your blog post, with a click of the mouse?

In my last post I promised that I will show you how to do this. so here it is. Take a look at the pictures below. Both these pictures are exactly the same pictures. But one has the Polaroid, drop shadow, and tilt effect to it. And of course the picture caption. Would you like to know how to do this with simple mouse clicks (this one works with Windows Live Writer).?

Ok. The way to do this is pretty simple.

1. Download the Polaroid picture plugin for Windows Live Writer by Brett from this site: ‘http://www.brettonstuff.com/index.php/tech/polaroid-style-thumbnails’
2. Install the plugin. Open up your Windows Live Writer (WLW), and from the right sidebar click on “Polaroid Picture” under Insert menu, instead of the regular Picture menu item.
3. Select the picture like you normally do in the explorer window, and that is it! It’s done!

You can set the preferences for the plugin so it can generate random tilt, or you can always set the tilt the way you want each time, drop shadow feature is enabled by default, enter the caption for the picture etc. Very nice little and easy to use plugin.

Now, are you wondering how did I do the other picture effect? The one where you clicked on the above image thumbnails and they opened up the way they did? If you are, then stay tuned for the next article.

Tags: blog, blogging, picture effects, pictures, polaroid, Technology, tilt, tips tricks, Windows Live Writer, wlw, WordPress, wordpress themes

Adding pictures to your blog not only makes the article look interesting, and your blog site look attractive, but it may cause the visitors to your site to spend more time and actually start reading the article. Sometimes, pictures could be the reason why your site visitor may even click on the “read more” and open up the article. The more time a visitor spends on your site, the better it is. For this matter it does not even matter if you have your blog for social networking, non-profit, for profit, make money online, education or anything else. The goal is to get your message across to your site visitor, and that means they take the time to stay on your site and read your post. And pictures can help increase the chances of this happening easily.

Picture Formats

Pictures come in many different formats. You must have seen the file extensions like .jpg, .jpeg, .bit, .bmp, .gif, .tiff,.gif and so on. Well, there is another one not so commonly used, and that is .png.

Portable Network Graphics (PNG) is a bitmapped image format that employs lossless data compression. PNG was created to improve upon and replace GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) as an image-file format not requiring a patent license.The PNG acronym is optionally recursive, unofficially standing for “PNG’s Not GIF”.

I use .png for all my pictures. You can open up any picture in any format in one of your favorite picture editors, like Microsoft Paint, and then FILE-SAVE AS and change the file extension to .PNG and save it. Much better quality image and much better compression compared to the other formats.

The only downside is that your site visitors who are using older web browsers, like Internet Explorer 6 (IE-6) or older versions, may not be able to see the picture. I usually don’t care or worry about it very much. If you do, then use other older formats.

Picture Size

Assuming the server storage space is not an issue, upload the picture in it’s original size, and then re-size it on your post so it looks great. You can adjust the size of the picture as it would look on your post using whatever tools your writing interface provides you. I use Windows Live Writer and that lets me simply click on the picture and then re-size it using the mouse pointer dragging one of the corners.

Picture Link

Pictures can be linked to either another web-site, web-page, blog, blog-post, or just about anything you want to link it to. In my case, the pictures usually link to the original picture, which is in much bigger size (original size as uploaded). Make sure if you want the original/bigger size picture to open up in the same window or a new window when you are creating your link for the picture.

Picture Alignment

Make sure that you align the picture the way it looks best in your post. If you read my posts, you will see that I usually align them to the right or the left, and the post content wraps around the picture. This will ensure better looks in all if not most of the web browsers your visitor might be using.

Picture Label

First, the picture name should be relevant to your post content. So, when you upload the picture, make sure that you save it with a good name, caption, title etc. So this is all relevant to the content where the picture if going to be placed. This helps with the relevancy and keywords etc. for the SEO.

I will talk about some picture enhancements, like picture tilt, Polaroid effects, shadows, and other advanced picture effects in one of my next articles.

Tags: add, blog, blogging, formats, internet browser, picture effects, pictures, polaroid, server, tilt, Web Browser, wordpress themes