PC Magazine released an article on July 11th on Simple Photo Editors.

Most of us only need the very basics in image editing for our photographs and images we use on business websites and in publications.

In my virtual assistance business and for personal use, my tasks include the following:

  • Resize photographs for printing and use in publications.
  • Removal of red eye and fixing the color and brightness.
  • Resizing images for websites to make them smaller.
  • Cutting out parts of images to overlay with others.
  • Making color photographs or images black-and-whites for dramatic effect.
  • Adding text to images.
  • Making your company name into an image.
  • and so forth.

I use a combination of Google’s Picasa and Adobe’s Photo Elements (a much more affordable version of PhotoShop) to handle all my needs.

Google’s Picasa is what I use for my photo catalog and basic photo editing such as cropping, red eye, and brightness adjustments. The free application has the ability to upload my images to Google’s Photo Gallery and to several print shops such as Snapfish and Kodak’s PhotoGallery.

Adobe Photo Elements is what I use for business purposes. It is very easy to change the width and height of images in pixels for my website.

HINT: For websites, change pixels per inch to 72. This makes the image file smaller and therefore it will load quicker. The image will not look grainy as this is the standard used by browsers for displaying images.

For printed documents, the image should be 300 pixels per inch. Otherwise it will look grainy.