Easy to Use Image Editing Tools

I have come to realize that image editing tools are much more user-friendly than I recall! I had some fun experimenting with different image manipulation tools, and here are a few that I found to be particularly great for multiple reasons.

http://picasa.google.com/

1) Picasa is a free online image editing tool from Google. Picasa is very easy to download, and works on every operating system. I found this to be a bonus, as some of the other software I investigated could only run on either Windows or Macs, not both, like Picasa. Upon download, Picasa uploads all of the pictures from your computer. Picasa’s purpose is to edit and touch up photos. Since an abundance of pictures can be uploaded to Picasa, a nice tool that it offers it to edit a ‘batch’ of pictures, in which you can edit or add effects to a whole group of pictures at once. You can also make slideshows, and Web Albums, that make pictures easy for sharing.  There are also multiple editing effects to choose from like straighten, red eye fix, sharpen, black and white, comic book, pixelate and more. Additionally, because Picasa is associated with Google, it makes photos very easy to share on Google Plus. One feature of Picasa that caught my eye, was side-by-side editing, in which you can compare the original photo to your edited one side-by-side.  Overall, Picasa is an easy to use basic image editing software, that is best suited for teachers and students who are performing basic editing on large sets of image files.

http://fotoflexer.com/

2) Fotoflexer is an image editing software that does not need to be downloaded to your computer. You can simply upload a photo that you wish to edit right from the FotoFlexer website. This is a convenient feature as you can use FotoFlexer on any computer with internet access. Photos are uploaded from your computer, from social networking sites (Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa, etc.), or you can even upload a picture from the web by entering the URL.  FotoFlexer’s tools are well laid out for the users in tabs.  Some of the basic functions include: auto fix, fix red eye, crop, and more. There is an effects tab, in which you can have the choice to add various effects to the photo, including, colour splash, blurred edges, comic, neon, grey-scale, and more. FotoFlexer also has the option to decorate your photo with text, stickers, borders, and other fun decorations. Another neat feature of FotoFlexer is that you can add layers to your picture. I like that with all of the effects and tools, you can click on them, and they are applied to the image so you can see if you like it, but you can just as easily click cancel and the image will set back to it’s original. This gives the user the flexibility to ‘play around’ with the tools available to them. When saving the photo you can save it to your computer, or the user can save it to a social media connected to FotoFlexer.  


Below is a picture I edited while experimenting with FotoFlexer: