OT Photo Software

[Tomzhere]

Can anyone recommend good software for editing photos, resizing and making thumbnails for web pages.

I'd like to be able to crop several photos then paste or layer them on top of each other to create a new photo/file then make the edited photo/file into a thumbnail. Can this be done?

Also for dail-up users what is a good photo size in pixels per photo, and per web page?

Thanks in advance.
Tom

[SGW]

There's always PhotoShop, but that's expensive and probably overkill for what you're trying to do. What you want to do is not a big deal. Generally some kind of "free" software comes with digital cameras that can probably do that kind of thing. If not with yours, see what your friends may have gotten with theirs.

Another thought is Paint Shop Pro. Cheaper than PhotoShop!

As far as size: I gather that your idea is to do small thumbnails, then if somebody is interested they can click on the thumbnail and take the hit on download time to get a better-quality picture. That's a good approach, I think. If you have 2K-3K thumbnails, they'll download reasonably quickly. It all depends on one's personal level of patience.

[Forrest Addy]

You don't need an elaborate, full featured version of image processing software for 99.9% of home and website applications.

I use the cheap Costco version of PhotoShop Elements 2.0 for $80. It works great making it easy to diddle with image size, resolution, color balance, contrast, beta curves, retouching, tiling, overlaying, and dozens of other manipilation techniques.

[Evan]

I recommend Paint Shop Pro. I am an official (unpaid) beta tester for Jasc, the company that makes it, just so you know my interest. It is every bit as good as Photoshop and you can do anything that you are willing to learn. There are a zillion tutorials and a large user community to help you out and a very good forum hosted by JASC.

[applescotty]

Here are two pretty good free image manipulation programs:

Irfanview
For simpler things, I'd recommend this. I think it will do what you want. It's quite popular.

For the Open Source route, you can go with The Gimp. The developer's version has many more features than the currently released version. You can find Windows installers and instructions here. The Gimp is similar to Photoshop, although not quite as polished.

applescotty

[jfsmith]

LViewPro, cheap, it is a cheap editor, not full featured. I have Photo Shop, Illustrator and so on for my graphics work. But for quick and dirty work, Lview works for me.


Jerry