Six Free Graphics Apps–with Gusto
December 12th, 2007 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 16 CommentsTweet This
High-end graphics applications have gotten so bloated and filled with features, that I often prefer to use their free, skinny cousins. Sure, Photoshop is a powerhouse program, but the vast majority of work with graphics that I do on the web consists of quickly adjusting files and moving them. I want in and out fast. In this post, I’ll round up six free downloadable applications that you can get in and out of in a snap. You’ll find that they have surprisingly rich features too.
Easy Thumbnails, above, is a free application that is used widely to create thumbnail images (the small graphics you see when you, say, do a Google Image search and get a page of various graphics back). However, it is also good for scaling images incrementally up or down in size and you can resize large groups of images in batches with it. For example, you can scale all photos you have in one folder up in size at once.
Easy Thumbnails supports a ton of graphics formats, and also gives you a fairly good set of image editing tools. You can rotate images, adjust contrast, brightness, and sharpness.
XnView is the program that I turn to when I need to convert many images to various formats, and especially obscure formats. It supports over 400 formats, and you can get it for Windows or the Mac.
IrfanView is among the most powerful of free graphics applications available, and I’ve written about it before. For really robust graphics applications, I like Photoshop, but for get-in-quick and get-out-quick tasks IrfanView is just right.
If you frequently need to crop images for, say, a blog or a web page, try EasyCropper. It’s a free web app that lets you just upload an image and very quickly make your changes, as seen below. The quickness comes from doing the task right on the web.
If you do a lot of screen captures for a blog or a site, MWSnap is a good way to take your capture and customize it in one fell swoop, without fooling around with bulky graphics editors. You can choose to capture, say, just a menu, or a whole screen, and you can also zoom, adjust colors, and size your image with a ruler.
FontSelector is a good way to quickly scan and print literally all of the fonts you have available to you. It also gives you a tab you can select for information on how to get a new version of any favorite font.
Do you have any good tips on free graphics applications?
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Seashore is a free and open source editor for the Mac. Imagewell is free, but not open source. ChocoFlop (also for Mac) looks promising, but it’s a buggy alpha version.
Actually, for basic editing, pixer.us or another online editor may work.
Picasa doesn’t do a bad job either. Going to look into the thumbnailer program. Thanks
I am a huge fan of Paint.net and Gimp. Both are Opensource and very powerful.
I found a program called akFontViewer that is free at http://www.aksoft.net/progs/akfontviewer/. It too shows you all of the fonts, but actually allows you the ability to see the text of your choice with several font options. I use it every time I do a design.
While not a new program, I did outline a way to use photoshop to set up macros. So if you need to convert sizes, or do adjustments that are exactly the same to a bunch of images (like say, resizing some photos you took to a manageable size) you can set up a macro to run through that pretty quick.
http://www.10inkstudios.com/blog/?p=21
Samuel,
Thanks for the recap. Can I make a suggestion? In a review like this, it think would be helpful if for each software you could include a simple parenthetic note of the operating systems it can run on a la (Windows) or (Windows, OS X). Example, XnView would more fairly read something like: (Windows, Mac, Linux, other Unixes)
Jim
I’m a big fan of Paint.Net
http://www.getpaint.net/
I like SmartDraw. You can use it to make process flwocharts, docs for six sigma, TQM, ISO, and for Gantt & cause and effect diagrams.
You can download a free trial here:
http://www.smartdraw.com/specials/isoflowcharting.asp?id=1122
You can also one-click copy to MS docs like PowerPoint and also PDF. A great tool!