I love the wonderful graphics you can get via Google Image Search, and the like, and I would love to make my own. Sadly, I lack the artistic talent (or understanding of Photoshop and so on) to make anything particularly nice.
I do what I can – with simple tools – to make things that look reasonable if not fantastic. What I want in an editor is pretty simple – add text, lines, boxes, resize, stick other images within my image. I can’t really handle much else.
I sometimes use Picasa – aside from its annoying habit of trying to catalogue all of the images I have on my computer (and the secondary hard drive) it provides some basic stuff I can use – crop (including intelligent crop) adding text (from my own computer, so including extra fonts I have downloaded) and some nice touch-up effects. The downside is that you cannot fiddle with the image – add extra space, overlay and so on. But, it’s free, so why complain?!
I also use PhotoScape (another freebie) particularly for resizing, cropping and red-eye removal, it’s very easy to use.
But my favourite of all is based online, and simply called the Online Image Editor. Even I find this one easy – create a canvas, or upload an image, and you can then add text, resize, crop, make parts of it transparent and go all old-fashioned with horrible blinking glittery things. (I don’t use those last ones) I do like their choice of fonts which are limited but include a decent number of script ones as well as the standard. I use this rather a lot as I do Facebook advertising for a bar I work in, as well as for my own enjoyment.
I would definitely recommend checking out the latter – no ads, no downloads, no adware or malware. Just a nice easy thing to use without paying a penny.
Keep swimming!
InterNessie 