Photoshop and Microsoft Paint are the immediate tools that come to mind, when you are thinking of editing a digital photograph. And 'Paint Shop Pro' is not behind. With the various terms like layering, touch-up,masking etc, painting a picture has become a science in itself. No longer do we need to be an artist (theoritically), if you want to make a picture 'picture perfect' :-). In this section, I want to present you with various Web 2.0 services that get the job done for an average user. These help us by filling in for the commercial software like Photoshop or Paint shop pro, which you may need to remove that "red eyed" picture you just shot with your digital camera. Some of these services are so good that if you have a broadband connection, you will not even think about owning another piece of painting software. Edit your pictures Online: When we talk about editing pictures the most common things we want to do with a picture are Rotate Resize Enhance (Brighten/Darken) Crop and Convert the file format
And for the above things, the default "Microsoft Paint" works seamlessly. However, there are not that many built-in options to get our job done faster. The following are the services which provide us a few more options than the Paint application. These online options work best if you want to send that picture, bloated in size (3 MB) in an email, say from work, where you don't have the luxury of using the software you like/own. Just get onto picnik.com or snipshot.com, save it as a JPEG and the picture would have reduced to 200-300KB. Fauxto is so full of features that I call it the 'Online Photoshop'. You can get your work done, without buying/installing any software for photo editing. Editing pictures for Passport photos or for a Photo ID: When it comes to taking passport size photos for application forms, passport, visa or Photo IDs, the best way is to make them on your own. Some countries like UK do not allow this as their biometric instruments will treat 'digitally modified' documents as invalid. But for all other practical purposes, you can print the photos. Taking a passport size photograph on its own (a single photo) costs quite a bit, when you compare with the printing cost for a regular photo. The slickest way is to create a "4x6 sized" image, with multiple copies of your passport size image and just print that one. With this, you can print 6 passport sized photos for the price of 1 4x6 print. epassportphoto.com that will make this much, much smoother. It allows you to print photos for passport or visa or an ID card. You can upload your scanned copy of the image, select the size and create a 4x6 or 5x7 copy with multiple passport sized photograph. I was searching for exactly something like this, as I didn't want to waste all that photo paper. Website snapshots: Many times, I wanted to take a snapshot of the website I am looking at, to send it to my friends. Sending a link works, but a picture is worth .... you know it. So, while I am still at 'editing pictures', let me list down the websites where you can easily create the thumbnails/snapshots of webpages. Thumbalizr.com is very cool. There were so many instances where to capture a website's thumbnail, I had to do print screens multiple times, to make the full page as one image. This website makes it a zap to do so. Tip: And when I am talking about reducing the size, let me tell you something. When you get the picture from a camera, say it is 1.2 MB and is already a JPG, just open it and save it again as JPG with Microsoft Paint itself. The size instantly reduces. You might wonder how but the reason in a nut shell is that the camera stores a lot of detail and your application (Paint) doesn't. So, this might as well work, if you want a much quicker solution and have no internet connection. (Well, how would you be reading this if you don't have one :-Q)
Mobile Phone-Scan,Copy & Fax There are a bunch of websites which gives us the flexibility of converting pictures of whiteboards and documents from a meeting into a professional pdf files. You can just snap the non-electronic whiteboard after a meeting and have it available to you as an image file or a pdf file in an instant.
Send Photos to India I couldn't find a better place to put up this info and so here it is. The list below is the list of all websites that allow you to send your photos to India. |