{"id":291,"date":"2009-11-17T07:54:04","date_gmt":"2009-11-17T11:54:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/awgentry.com\/blog\/?p=291"},"modified":"2009-11-17T07:54:04","modified_gmt":"2009-11-17T11:54:04","slug":"graphics-programs-on-the-cheap-part-ii-basic-editors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/awgentry.com\/weblog\/graphics-programs-on-the-cheap-part-ii-basic-editors\/","title":{"rendered":"Graphics Programs on the Cheap, Part II: Basic Editors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So you&#8217;ve stepped up from the single-task graphics apps and you want something a wee bit robust. Where do you go if you&#8217;re not flush with cash? Here are a few options:<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/windowshelp.microsoft.com\/Windows\/en-US\/help\/f5feb1df-8dd7-4ab0-9f65-3c1c89a329ab1033.mspx\"><strong>Microsoft Paint<\/strong><\/a> &#8211; Ah, good old Paint. No, I&#8217;m not saying you should all your entire graphics design work on this little program, but it&#8217;ll get you through in a (minor) pinch.<\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<li><em>Pros: <\/em>It&#8217;s decent for cropping, file conversion, and <em>very<\/em> basic layout work.<\/li>\n<li><em>Cons:<\/em> Anti-aliasing isn&#8217;t that great. There&#8217;s no layering. There are no options for JPG compression percents, transparent GIFs, or other file type attributes. JPGs are rather blurry, PNGs have a large file size, and GIFs usually lose significant quality. It also saves extensions (.JPG, .PNG) in capital letters, so you might want to write them out in lower-case on your filename when you save it. Options are very limited overall.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/office.microsoft.com\/en-us\/help\/HP010017211033.aspx\"><strong><br \/>\nMicrosoft Picture Manager<\/strong><\/a> &#8211; While more of an image-tweaking program than a graphics editor, Picture Manager has its benefits. It&#8217;s best used as a quick fix when making minor adjustments to photos.<\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: left;\">\n<li><em>Pros:<\/em> Nice job of cropping and resizing graphics, auto color correct, lighten\/darken, and editing multiple files at a time. Easy to figure out.<\/li>\n<li><em>Cons: <\/em>When resizing, you have to specify pixels instead of percents, and manually calculate the proportions between width and height. It has almost no features for real graphics-editing, but of course it&#8217;s not really meant for that&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.picasa.com\"><br \/>\nPicasa<\/a><\/strong> &#8211; An offering from Google, this is a desktop album app with limited file-editing capabilities. Once it&#8217;s downloaded, it grabs your graphics from throughout your computer and also assimilates (Google assimilates? Hmmm&#8230;) new additions.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Pros:<\/em> Very slick interface. When set as the default graphics editor, an opened picture zooms onto your screen in an impressive growing animation.<\/li>\n<li><em>Cons:<\/em> As a Google acquisition, I thought Picasa would be as easy to use and trouble-free as most other offerings from the big G. Unfortunately, as an online colleague of mine said, they should have taken more time to incubate it. It doesn&#8217;t grab new graphics consistently and has a confusing album-browsing interface, with the folders just listed individually instead of <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">hierarchly<\/span> <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">hierarchy-y<\/span> in a tree.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><em><br \/>\nWhat&#8217;s your favorite free or cheap graphics program? Let us know in the Comments!<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">\n[This is part two in a three-part series. You can read <a href=\"http:\/\/awgentry.com\/blog\/235\/graphics-programs-on-the-cheap-part-i-specialized-apps\">Part I: Specialized Apps<\/a>, then come back in two days for the final installment.] <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So you&#8217;ve stepped up from the single-task graphics apps and you want something a wee bit robust. Where do you go if you&#8217;re not flush with cash? Here are a few options: Microsoft Paint &#8211; Ah, good old Paint. No, I&#8217;m not saying you should all your entire graphics design work on this little program,&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[99,108,111,112],"class_list":["post-291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creative","tag-free-programs","tag-google-picasa","tag-graphics-editors","tag-microsoft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/awgentry.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/awgentry.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/awgentry.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/awgentry.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/awgentry.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/awgentry.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/awgentry.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/awgentry.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/awgentry.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}