April 28, 2009

Free photo manipulation

Those of you who read this blog know that I love playing around in Photoshop. But Photoshop is too expensive for most of us to purchase it on our own. My copy is actually owned by my employer.

Just one of the free online filters

But today I found a great free online program that duplicates most of the tools and capabilities of Photoshop Elements. It is even laid out almost exactly the same. So if you'd like to play around with some of your photos to see what you can come up with, check out Pixlr.com. You can go to the Photo Express section to do quick cropping and minor adjustments or stay on the main section to use advanced features. It even includes such advanced tools as layers. Fantastic!

I opened the photo shown here in Pixlr.com and played a bit with the saturation, the field of focus and then applied a kaleidoscope filter to it. Very cool.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the tip!

    ReplyDelete
  2. This looks nice! I've just downloaded it for my Firefox browser and am impressed thus far.

    I didn't notice it, but do you know if it has "stiching" ability. (for panoramics)

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  3. Scott - I didn't see that capability in it, but didn't really check it out that closely. I use PC PhotoStitch for panoramics. It came on a CD of software with my Canon Camera and it works very well. I don't know how much it would normally cost, but I know it's a whole lot less than PhotoShop. PhotoShop does panoramic stitching quite well, but PC Photostitch is so easy to use that I always go for that.

    I used PC Photostitch on this blog header and on this blog header.

    If you'd like a free panoramic stitching software, Windows Live Photo Gallery is outstanding and easy to use also.

    ReplyDelete

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