A fast and usable FREE Image Editor
Few simple requirements for a free image editor
Sometimes you really want to edit few images or tweak fast a couple of photos, without waiting for Photoshop to load. Or you don't want to actually wait for your computer to boot up, since you are browsing the net on your netbook. If that sounds familiar you are probably already using some kind of a less powerful, free image/photo editor for those cases.
Any image editor that wants to grab some user attention is directly competing with Photoshop. This is the exact reason why Gimp won't ever be a usable piece of software: it's written by a bunch of geeks... And geeks write software to be used by geeks. And such software it's just not usable. The users will inevitably compare it with the grand Ps. So instead of writing a comparative article of the top 10 free editors I did put a short list of very simple requirements...
- A FREE editor should not show repetitively "upgrade to premium version" messages
- Should have easy to use UI (resembling Photoshop is a good step)
- Should have an easily visible at all times zoom tool (many actually don't have)
- Should have easy to use History panel, where the user can quickly select steps in the past
- Should support masks
- Should support layer effects and have interesting filters
- Should export gif, png and jpeg files and show the expected file size beforehand
- Should not be a beta quality software
- Should be a cross-platform software
...and I selected one editor to showcase.
Pixlr is easy to use, helps your work process, and has a free API
Pixlr is a set of photoediting services offering the following great online software:
- Free full featured image editor
- Free express photo adjustments
- Free API for you to include full blown photo editing in your web site
You can really quick open a photo while using only your browser and edit it in a way you are pretty much used to do in Photoshop; furthermore while you're on it, why not offer your customer integration of a full featured Photoshop like photo editor for his new CMS?
Full set of familiar tools
The first impression inevitably is that the interface looks much like Photoshop. And that's a good thingreally. The moment you open the editor you know how to use it already. And fact is things work in the way you would expect, unlike in many other free and paid image editing programs, which try to reinvent the wheel.
Second impression Pixlr makes is that it's very fast. It's a pleasure to work with, since apparently the authors spent quite some time to make it look snappy. It's small things really, like the fact that menu clicks are tracked on "mouse down" event. Until you get you finger off the button the dialog which the menu invokes is already on the screen. Wrooom ... fast !
Just to name few of the features: layers, history, undo & redo, layer blending, layer effects, free transform, masks, full featured color adjustments, hue and levels adjustments. It is packed with features, and they work - it's by no means an alpha - beta quality software.
Possibility to edit the levels of each of the RGB channels, are also complimented by fast graph showing your changes. Nice to see- even if quite simple, are the layer effects.
Wow, what filters!
The effects are definitely a strong point for Pixlr; the current full list consist of: Blur, Sharpen, Denoise, Noise, Diffuse, Scanlines, Halftone, Pixelate, Pointize, Water swirl, Kaleidoscope, Tilt shift, Vignette, Pastels, Old photo, Cross process, Art poster, Heat map, Tri tone, Color lookup, Emboss, Engrave.
How to integrate Pixlr in your work process
What is really great is the numerous ways of integration possible for Pixlr in your daily routine.
Open/Save images: The simplest way to use it is to open a file from your computer, work on it, and then save it back to your computer and then use it for whatever purpose locally. Additionally you can open an image from a given URL or use the separate Firefox extension to open directly for editing images from pages you are browsing.
Start fresh: Create a new image in Pixlr and use the drawing tools and the choice of filters. For example the pattern below was created starting on a blank canvas and only applying Pixlr filters one after another.
Firefox plugin: If you do a lot of screenshots or often you work with images from internet, there's thePixlr Grabber plugin which allows to to edit photo from a web site directly in Pixlr or take a screenshot of a site and annotate it in Pixlr.
Share images online: Pixlr also have their own image sharing service which is also combined with a URL shortening service. Wow. You can open an image directly from somebody's web site, edit it, then save it to Pixlr sharing service http://imm.io/. It's quite easy from the Pixlr File->Save dialogue, then ... get the short url and twitter about your new creation...
The Pixlr save dialogue - note the options: save to my computer and share to imm.io
Integration with your desktop: Grabber 1.0 for Windows allows you to right click an image file and choose to edit in in Pixlr, that's a time saver if you are on Windows. Hopefully the Pixlr team will surely come up with a Mac version too.
How to offer YOUR customers full featured photo editing
Pixlr has an API service which allows you to open an image in Pixlr and get back the modified version of it, when the visitor is finished editing that image. Long story short: you get a free "Photoshop" for your web sites. The API is free and open for everyone to use, though Pixlr note the fact they accept donations.
Examples: You will find in the following link few very straight forward examples; the first being really great by showing how when the visitor clicks on an image it opens an overlay div which contains the Pixlr editor. Great stuff, do check it out:
Related Resources
Posted in Software on 18.Feb 2010
