Useful Info
If you’re working on a position that requires adding or editing content that is visible on the web, you surely already know that having the right tools for image manipulation is a must. If you happen to have a graphic designer in your team, you probably know that Adobe Photoshop is the most popular tool for the job and with the latest Creative Cloud subscription packages available for companies, you can get Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC and Adobe XD CC for 70 euros / month. But what if you only need a tool for small assignments and you don’t want to have to learn Adobe Photoshop or pay an additional license?
Then you are most likely in the search for some free image editor that can handle most of the basic tasks with ease and with a minimum learning curve. You would probably want to crop, resize, adjust levels and maybe take care of the compression and all that in just a couple of minutes. Let’s see what the options are.
As a side note, if you only want to use this kind of tool for resizing + compression, so that you website looks good and loads fast, then you must know that these features can be implemented in your platform by a software development company, so that no-matter the size of the image you upload, the rest is done by the CMS / web application behind the scenes.
1. GIMP – is probably the most popular Photoshop alternative out there, being a free & open source image editor that offers quite a lot. It has no ads & limitation, you just have to install the software on your operating system. Some of the features of this software are only available on premium editors, but you would probably need a bit of time to get acquainted with it. GIMP operates without problems on Linux, Windows and Mac. GIMP is one of our strong suggestions, especially if you’re looking for a tools that’s powerful and free.
2. Birme + TinyJPG – OK, yea, I know. It’s not “one tool”, but a combination; still, Birme is very powerful and fast in terms of processing multiple resized / cropped images and it will even allow you to choose the JPG quality, in cause you want to try to handle part of the compression using it’s interface. TinyJPG does the rest of the job, by properly compressing the outputtted images obtained via Birme. Both tools are available online, you don’t need to install anything locally. Just hit the official sites and start editing. Really useful tools for web admins / hobby bloggers or even magazine editors.
3. Photoscape – just like in GIMP’s case, you would need to install the software on your operating system. But after you’ve done that, you have a lot of features available; resizing, brightness and color adjustment, white balance, backlight correction, frames, balloons, mosaic mode are just few of the editor options available. If you’re a fashion or travel blogger, you might find interesting using the Splitter; the Combine + Animated GIF are also some fun features.
Side note: if you were curios about free editors just so that you can compress images and improve the speed on your WordPress powered site, you may want to read this article: 4 WordPress Performance Plugins You Should Use.
What other tools are you using? What are the most common actions you take while in the process of image manipulation? Share your thoughts with us using the comment form below.