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How to make working with images less horrible — Part 2: Easy image editing for PCs and Macs

posted on Jul 12, 2012 by kristi-lynn

So now that we’ve gone over how to choose image file types and resolutions, let’s talk about how we actually edit those images (without the expensive software) so that we can use them on a website. For this article, I’m going to avoid talking about Photoshop. Photoshop is great software — we use it every day — it's professional and it's expensive. We're discussing consumer-level editing (and pricing) for those of you out there that just need something quick and dirty to get the job done.

Did you miss Part 1: File Types and Resolution? Here it is!

First I’m going to go over some options that are preinstalled on your computer, and then we’ll talk about some third party alternatives that might give you a little more flexibility.

Let’s talk about PCs first

This section is just going over some options for editing photos that are preinstalled into different versions of Windows.

Windows Live Photo Gallery >
If you’re using a PC running windows 7 (the latest Windows version), there is a software built in called “Windows Live Photo Gallery” and it should be preinstalled on your computer. This software gives you the ability to do some basic editing of photos like cropping, adjusting the color, removing red eye and a few other nifty things. Here’s a tutorial of how to edit using it.

Windows Media Center >
If you’re using a PC running Windows Vista, the penultimate release of Windows, you should have a program called “Windows Media Center”. In there you should be able to crop pictures and make a few other small adjustments. It’s not going to be quite as advanced as the Windows Live Photo Gallery on Windows 7, but it’s better than nothing. Here’s a tutorial of how to edit using Windows Media Center.

Microsoft Paint >
For those poor souls out there still using Windows XP, your best preinstalled option for photo editing is MS Paint. If nothing else, you can crop images and save them as different file types. Just don’t save them as BMPs, those are useless to anything but Windows, and I think it’s the default file type. Here’s a tutorial of how to edit using MS Paint (kind of).

Now on to the Macs

This section is just going over some options for editing photos that are preinstalled into the Mac OS.

iPhoto >
iPhoto is part of Apple’s iLife suite which comes preinstalled on all new Macs. iPhoto gives you the ability to do some basic editing of photos like cropping, adjusting the color, removing red eye and more. It’s easy to use but doesn’t have a lot of file type options. Here’s a tutorial of how to edit using iPhoto.

Preview >
Preview gives you the ability to crop and resize phots as well as edit the resolution and save in at least a couple different file formats. Here’s a tutorial.

Some third-party image editing options

Gimp >
Gimp is a pretty full-featured image editor, similar to Photoshop, but entirely free to download and use. It’s advanced, but it’s well-documented and has a wide user base so help is usually available from other users.

Photoshop Elements >
This is a great consumer-level alternative to Photoshop. It’s created by Adobe also, but the price point is much lower and the software is much simpler than Photoshop. At a $100 (vs. Photoshop’s $700) price tag, it’s a great software that has editing and saving functions at a much higher level than you’d get with the preinstalled softwares.

So that’s it, now hopefully you’ll be able to edit images, resize them for the web if needed, and not wonder, WHAT AM I DOING?! Of course, if you get stuck you can always contact us!

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