Freebie Photoshop?

Davidc316

Like my of you folks, I am interested in the idea of building websites for people and giving them the ability to update their sites via some sort of online control panel. Although I like to think I'm ok at this, I've noticed that my clients are having real problems editing and uploading their own images. This is a real pain in the neck when you've maybe spent a thousand hours or so working on the actual workings of the website.

I guess most of the folks here (like myself) will be comfortable using software like Photoshop and Painshop pro, but for your average guy on the street these are not affordable solutions. What's more, your average website owner will never really need 99% of the functions that are available on powerful software like Photoshop.

I would love nothing more than to be able to recommend a freebie downloadable software package for my punters (and to then talk them through the basics of how to use it). Can anyone recommend such a thing?

PS- I have already been working my way through some of the offerings on Download.com, but none of them are quite hitting the mark.

piersk

Gimp?

rikmoncur

irfanview -
http://www.irfanview.com
- it's so good it should be installed on all computers. It's a small download too. I highly recommend it.

dalecosp

rikmoncur wrote:
irfanview -
http://www.irfanview.com
- it's so good it should be installed on all computers. It's a small download too. I highly recommend it.

Last I knew, that was pretty much what its title indicates --- a viewer/format converter. Has anything changed? I don't think that's what the OP is asking about, great though it is for that purpose....

piersk wrote:
Gimp?

Yes, definitely. Although, for most folks, "mspaint.exe" is a tad more user-friendly. If this was for the O.P. personally, it'd be great. I dunno if this would do him a lot of good with the above-mentioned "people" though. I have a feeling he is talking about people like the client who called Friday upset because the monitor on a server wasn't working. So, we drive 15 minutes to their place and plug it in..... :rolleyes:

Merve

I wouldn't recommend the GIMP, because as you know, although it is free, it is very hard to learn to use. It's not very user-friendly and I'm pretty sure that's not something you want to recommend to your clients.

Weedpacket

I'd concur with dalecosp. While I pretty much use the Gimp exclusively (so I don't have any alternates to offer), it's too powerful for muggles. (Dunno about hard to learn - seemed pretty straightforward to me, but maybe that's because I used to use Photoshop.)

bubblenut

Real men use ImageMagick!

In all seriousness though, if the users requirements are something as simple as "resample all the product images to x1 by y1 and x2 by y2 then it may be easier to write a script which does this for them. If you're building images from scratch or fiddling with the histograms the ImageMagick really is for men, women would never be that stupid, 😉

rikmoncur

no, irfanview has a lot going for it - although you can't create images from scratch, it's ideal for the client who has a photograph and just needs to resize/resample/crop an image. It does stuff like sharpen/saturation etc but it's also able to have other filters like Optikverve which does a huge range of effects (it'll also open photoshop filters). It's small, free, really easy to use, creates slideshows, screensaver etc...

Even if you go for gimp or something, irfanview is still a hot download and it'll probably do 80-90% of what a client would need.

Weedpacket

I use Irfanview as well (I just don't think of it as an image editor). So yeah, it kinda depends on what sort of "editing" we're talking about here. If we are talking about things like resizing and flipping and redeye and suchlike, then Irfanview does all that sort of thing quite handily.

Sxooter

The Gimp, to me, is no easier or harder than Photoshop. Of course, neither one is simple and easy to use. Look at PaintShop Pro or some of those class programs for mere mortals who don't want to learn the complexities of Gimp / PShop. It's not free, but it's not 500 bucks or anything either.

vaaaska

I've been rather surprised of late to find that nobody has created an online photo shop tool using Ajax. It would do simple things, but it's certainly possible now. I've seen bits and pieces here and there, but not an effort to pull things together...

csn

For client-side stuff, I use PSP. For server-side, I use Imagemagick. There's a really easy to use interface for Ruby called rmagick.

onion2k

GD2 is better than ImageMagick. But I would say that..