Digital Image Editing March 6, 2007
Posted by Brian in : Exc.el BLogs, GLOW, Uncategorized, digital imaging, social media, teachmeet, web 2.0 , trackbackAt the last GLOW mentors in service day I was part of a team with Dr Robin Strain and Tess Watson tasked to come up with an in service on digital imaging.
The idea of the course is for staff to acquaint themselves with the hardware and software needed to start working with digital images.
Part of the course will cover basic editing of images. Not all the PC’s in East Lothian schools have editing software installed therefore for everyone to be able to carry out this function a good online editor had to be found.
There are a few out there so I thought I would run through the features of some of them and ask for any others that people would recommend.
A very basic picture editor that lets you resize, crop, rotate, adjust brightness, saturation and hue. Its advantages are that
- no registration required
- it has unlimited undo and redo.
- can handle large files (up to 10mb).
- imports from anywhere on the web.
- handles all file formats.
- can save edited photos to your own flickr account.
With its large, easy to use, buttons this could come in very handy in primary schools and will definitely merit a mention in the final in service presentation.
PXN8 is a very feature rich photo editing application and whilst it may not have the same visual appeal as Snipshot it does let you do a bit more.
- zoom in and out.
- use filters to enhance photos i.e remove red eye, whiten teeth.
- spirit level function to straighten up pictures.
- fun features such as snow, text and charcoal effects.
This is another excellent online application that should make the cut. It offers a bit more than snipshot and may be popular with those wishing to experiment with photo editing.
Phixr is an application that we came across on the day of the GLOW mentors in service and it seemed to tick all the boxes but recently I have had difficulty in getting it to work. It now works well due to the hard work and excellent customer service from the guys at Phixr.
- no need to register with session time of up to 2 hours.
- preview effects before applying.
- variety of effects and photo overlay option.
- email the photo from Phixr itself, or upload it to Flickr, FotoPic, Photobucket, Fotolog, Buzznet, DropShots and LiveJournal.
This was the leading contender. Problems with the website may, however,put this one on hold for the time being.
This is the leading contender thanks to the hard work put in by the guys at Phixr who have managed to get it working in our schools. Excellent customer focus.
If you want to try any of these site out then just click on their logo. Let me know what you think of them and which you think would be most apt for use in schools.
Also if you have come across a good photo editing site then please again let me know and the team will evaluate it for its inclusion in the forthcoming Teachmeet roadshows.
Happy editing.
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Comments»
A useful image manipulation site that Katie Revell found out about is http://www.resize2mail.com.
This does as it says on the tin, and provides a quick way to resize .jpg and .gif mage files. Of course, despite the site’s name it’s also ideal for resizing images for use on blogs or web sites. It can also rotate images left 90, right 90, or flip ‘em 180 degrees.
Hey Brian,
Good to see you on Sat.
I know we looked at it, but I think it has been updated.
Give http://www.picnik.com a click
You don’t need to register now. I think that was why we abandoned it initially.
Tess
I have used all of these with varying success.
Fauxto
Picnik
Picture2life
Preloadr
PXN8
Snipshot (you mention this one already)
Also, Adobe is due to release a free, ad supported online version of Photoshop in six months.
Thanks for the suggestions David, Tess and Ollie. I will give them a try.
Tess I have just tried picnic it looks great, the only problem being that it is flash based and therefore wont run on many of ELC computers.
Hi, this is Thomas from phixr.com,
may I ask, what kind of problems did you have with the service?
We have performed some server updates in the last few days which might caused minor interruptions (for a few seconds), but otherwise we didn’t log any problems…
/Thomas