Images & Photos

Where do I start?

Choose a tool that works best for you. Did you know that you already have a few tools installed on your computer right now?  Every Windows user has tools that come with your PC, as well as the  powerful, easy-to-use, image editing capability is already embedded into your office productivity software.   If you have ever worked with PowerPoint, Publisher or Word,  you can use the knowledge you already have to create, edit and compress a graphic using exact RGB values in a matter of minutes!

PowerPoint Templates-- for building Navpods, Event Banners and Speaker Image Placeholders:

PowerPoint Template containing, templates for Navpods, Event Banners and Speaker Images

Create a Navpod graphic (in less than 3 minutes, using this template in PowerPoint)

Create Banner images for Event setup in Adobe Connect

Create a Speaker Image for Adobe Connect

Transform a Title into Eye Candy?

A Few Tools That Might Spark Interest

If you are feeling ready to explore more features, higher resolution, better pixel control, advanced layering and other cool photo effects, there are a few free options with  "how to" for common tasks listed above:

Photoshop Express

Is an app for mobile devices.  If you make your edits using a laptop or desktop computer, you will need the full version of Photoshop.  It is convenient when you are using your phone or iPad to capture images and you need to make edits on the fly before uploading them.

For more info, check out the product name on this site at https://www.photoshop.com/.

Picasa/PicMonkey

Powered by Google, Picasa is a powerful photo manager.  I personally use Picasa for my personal photos when I'm compiling photos as presents at Christmas time, the way it organizes the photos can be a little confusing because it takes the date from the photo file that was imported from  your camera-- which, if you camera runs out of power and then gets reset...can sometimes not be the most accurate date the picture was taken. The features I like and use include:

  • All kinds of edits, cropping to specific frame sizes, with a click of a button or a drag of the mouse. 
  • A cool recognition tool that will automatically tag the faces that are detected repeatedly in your image collection.  
  • In addition to the typical photo editing options such as brightness, contrast, color, but a cool feature called, "I'm feeling lucky" where it will attempt to make the changes for you.  You can try it to see if you like the decisions it made to enhance the background, sharpen the focus, etc...or you can undo it if doesn't enhance it the way you expected. 

I like the collage feature as well as how easy it is to share the files to the cloud on Google and/or Facebook.

For more info, check out the product name on this site at: http://picasa.google.com

SplashUp

For more info, check it out on this site a: http:/www.splashup.com