On Thursday, March 28th we took a look a several “Free” on-line image editing and design apps.
Before the session, Jacki remarked that the latest version of Windows Photos on Windows 11 has the ability to delete image backgrounds with a single click. This unfortunately was not the case for Windows 10! Jacki also suggested trying the completely free Android App “Image Toolbox” (no adds!) which had been mentioned in Computer Active magazine. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.tech.imageresizershrinker&pcampaignid=web_share – Chris installed this and proceeded to get totally stuck – more practice is required with this one!
Peter recommended Photodemon https://photodemon.org a free, portable, open-source photo editor for all versions of Microsoft Windows back to XP. It certainly looked impressive, with effective filters and image adjustments, though we got in a bit of a muddle with layers. Again some practice is required! Here’s a screenshot from their website:
We looked down the list of apps recommended by a Google Search for Best Free on-line image editing apps, and towards the top were
- Befunky: https://www.befunky.com But the free plan includes only basic image editing – none of the funky bells and whistles.
- Fotor: https://www.fotor.com The free plan includes basic image design and collage features. All the advanced AI features have to be paid for.
- Canva: https://www.canva.com This is mainly a design app for hobbyists and small businesses , but it is working on becoming a competitor for the Adobe photoshop design suite. It has a YouTube channel of online tutorials. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEDLeLo3HNQZiJOTR2svg2A The free package has limited uses of AI tools, and fewer templates, fonts etc.
Without any prior experience we played around with creating a video from three images and an audio track … and sort of succeeded. We should have watched this tutorial video first!
Finally, we took another look at PIXLR https://pixlr.com which we played with last week to see if it had useful stickers and animations. It was noted that the website app is different from that installed on phones and tablets. It has a different layout and the image editing tools are more powerful (though trickier ) to use. We created a ridiculous animated invite to a non-existent party. It didn’t work as expected when downloaded as a GIF, but here it is as a YouTube MP4 video:
Chris Betterton-Jones – Knowledge junkie