I'm going to keep posting this picture until everyone owns Photoshop.
People, I’ve told you time and time again that you need to get Photoshop. By any means necessary. I don’t care if you have to enter a contest on Pioneer Woman Photography every day for the rest of your life, get your hands on a copy of Photoshop stat. But since I know some of you will not want to take the extreme measures that might be required to procure a copy of Photoshop without paying an exorbitant price for it (cough Craigslist cough), I have decided to give you a couple of other options for photo editing in the meantime. These are options that allow you to edit some photos and do some other fancy stuff online without your own copy of Photoshop. Yes, I’m rewarding you for not listening to me about how important Photoshop is to your blogging career. Don’t get used to it.
- Picnik. Picnik combines an easy-to-use interface with powerful editing tools. You can mess around with basic stuff like color balance and hue and saturation, and then use their effects and fonts to add other features to your photo. I have never used the Picnik service myself, from what I understand there are certain features that you can use for free, and others which require that you subscribe.
- GIMP. If you want to use Photoshop without paying for it, GIMP is an open-source alternative that works pretty well and has similar functionality to Photoshop. The only bad part about using GIMP is that things that are made to work for Photoshop will not necessarily work in GIMP, so the Photoshop Actions and brushes that I show you here are not necessarily transferrable to GIMP. The good news is that there are many developers who use GIMP, so there’s a thriving community that puts out its own tools like actions and brushes made specifically for GIMP.
- Splashup. Splashup is another online photo editing service that works a lot like Picnik, but has the added feature of looking a lot like Photoshop and using some of the same tools.
- Pixlr.Pixlr is another online image editing service that works a lot like Photoshop.
- Sumopaint Sumopaint is a very popular Photoshop alternative. The software is downloaded to your computer, and you can save your information (along with layer files, etc.) on their server. You can also use their community pages to interact with other users from all around the world and get tips, etc.
- Lunapic. Lunapic is another online photo editing tool that allows you to upload and edit straight from their home page, no membership, no dilly-dally, just get started!
- FotoFlexer. Fotoflexer is another online photo editing tool with standard functionality and is hooked into all the various social networking sites, so you can edit a photo and send it directly to Facebook, for example. This is a service that is probably most useful for people who just need to resize and do minor edits on their photos, rather than for people who want to create lots of graphics for their websites.
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