While it’s not quite the same as hiring your own cartoonist, Cartoonize does a pretty decent job converting pictures into cartoon versions for those times you want to customize an avatar image or otherwise “cartoonize” a picture. More »
Blog Archives
Cartoonize Converts Photos into Cartoons [Image Editing]
Posted on January 1, 2011
Change Two Settings to Speed Up Photoshop [Photoshop Tip]
Posted on November 29, 2010
Just because a setting is tucked away doesn’t mean it can’t make a big difference. Many Photoshop veterans, for instance, are discovering that cutting out Cache Levels and Image Previews can make the photo editing beast a bit more agile. More »
Isolate an Object from a Complex Background in Photoshop [Photoshop]
Posted on October 1, 2010
If you need to pull a person or thing out of an image with a busy background and you’d like to do it with a minimal amount of fuss, this simple tutorial can help. More »
The Best Photography Apps for Your iPhone [IPhone]
Posted on September 30, 2010
With the quality of cellphone cameras approximating that of yesterday’s point-and-shoots, you can take some amazing photographs on your iPhone. It gets even better with the right apps apps. Here are our favorite photography apps for your iPhone. More »
Top 10 Photo Fixing and Image Editing Tricks [Lifehacker Top 10]
Posted on June 5, 2010
You probably know what Photoshop disasters look like, but your photos can benefit from more subtle and elegant touch-ups. With these tools and techniques, you can sharpen, texturize, re-contextualize, and remove tourists, among other problems, from your shots worth saving. More »
Image editing – Graphics – Photoshop – FAQs Help and Tutorials – Photoshop Elements
Easily Add Clouds to Any Picture in Photoshop [Photoshop]
Posted on March 20, 2010
There's nothing like a clear blue sky in real life, but it doesn't create for the most interesting photos—weblog MakeUseOf has a nice tutorial for easily creating clouds to spice up the skies. More »
Online Image Editor Aviary Now Entirely Free [Free]
Posted on February 12, 2010
Aviary Phoenix, a really powerful and reader favorite online image editor, used to charge $25 per year for private online image saving and other select features. As of yesterday, though, the Phoenix editor’s gone entirely free.
What the unlocking mainly does is remove a few minor annoyances that free users might have encountered before. You could always save your images and project files on Aviary and download them, but they were viewable by the searching public. Adding a personal watermark was also a paid-only feature, and all the tutorials weren't accessible—but now all that is gratis.
Those who paid for Aviary accounts in the last 30 days will get a refund, and those previously paid in will receive a blue badge to mark their support, as well as first-round access to alpha features as they develop. It’s heartening to see more high-powered webapps available for instant, full access when people need them.
Setting Aviary Free [Aviary blog via TechCrunch]
Pinta Brings Paint.NET’s Just-Enough Image Editing to Every Computer [Downloads]
Posted on February 9, 2010
Windows/Mac/Linux: If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the coders of Pinta love the heck out of the Windows-only image editor Paint.NET. Luckily, they also want to make it available on every OS, and are faithful to its just-enough interface methodology.
If you’ve read Lifehacker for a bit, you know we’re admirers of Paint.NET. It’s lightweight, free, and does most of what the average home user would want out of a photo editing and painting application, without making them learn an entire realm of commands and advanced photography terminology. It opens Photoshop files, it touches up images nicely, and it doesn’t cost $500, so we dig it.
Pinta is an open-source, multi-platform attempt to recreate the Paint.NET experience. It’s described as “early in development,” but for a 0.1 release, feels majorly on its way. It supports multi-layer editing, runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows (with some additional support installed), and a lot of the interface is already in place. I tried it out to edit, crop, and tone some images for this morning’s Lifehacker posts, and I could see working it into my rotation, as it’s a bit lighter and easier to get around than the GIMP, the other cross-platform image editor of note.
Pinta is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. Ubuntu and Fedora readers should hit the via link for a quick tip on making installation easier than compiling from source.
Shrink Pic Resizes Images Automagically for Faster Uploads [Downloads]
Posted on December 30, 2009
Windows only: Image resizing tools are a dime a dozen, but free utility Shrink Pic is actually an extremely clever original: Instead of requiring manual processing, it runs in the background and automatically resizes images whenever you attach or upload them.
A perfect tool for frequent Facebook uploaders, for example, Shrink Pic works with a number of applications (most browsers, Outlook, Thunderbird, Skype, and MSN Messenger, to name just a few) to monitor when you upload, attach, or send pictures via IM. When you do, it automatically resizes the images in the background based on user-defined settings, then uploads the smaller image (so you don’t have to wait several minutes for an upload to complete just to have it severely compressed at its destination anyway). It can even resize multiple photos in the same upload. The speed at which it resizes and the quality of the compression are nothing to sneeze at, either.
Shrink Pic saves the resized images in a temporary directory, so your originals are never touched—just copied. You can use any kind of compression level you want, as well as choose from 5 different photo types to check for. If you want to disable it, all you need to do is uncheck an option in your system tray—and re-enabling it is just as easy. You can even install a portable version to a USB drive, so you never have to resize images again—not even at other computers.
Shrink Pic is a free download, Windows only.
Shrink Pic [via AddictiveTips]
Use Google Docs to Convert Images to Text [Documents]
Posted on September 29, 2009
It’s not an official feature (yet), but Google Docs can perform OCR image-to-text conversions on high-resolution files you upload to it. They have to be pretty darned clear and crisp, but it’s a nice freebie.
Those with webapps or services that upload to Google Docs can use this URL parameter to accept PNG, JPG, and GIF files for conversion, listed as an “experimental” feature at the moment.
Users, in the meantime, can try out a conversion using their own accounts at the Google Code Samples link. I tried uploading PNG screen grabs of Lifehacker and Wikipedia to Google Docs for conversion. Docs returned nothing with Lifehacker’s text, and a somewhat muddled take on the Wikipedia entry for “life hack” with both PNG and JPG uploads (the full-quality JPG conversion, not pictured, fared just a bit better). Those were taken using nothing more than Ubuntu’s screen capture tool and GIMP, however, so if you’ve got a better screen capture tool, or an actual camera shot of some relatively clear text, you’ll probably do better.
Tell us how automatic Google Doc OCR might help you out in the comments.