Photoshop is Adobe’s flagship photo and image manipulation software – and for good reason.  It is an outstanding product for working creatively with images and has become the standard tool used by professionals.  Its name is so well known that ‘photoshopping’ has become an everyday phrase that has taken the place of ‘airbrushing’. Has an image been ‘photoshopped’? Nowadays you can be almost certain that it has.

Except that it may not have been ‘photoshopped’ in Photoshop. Beside being a leading edge product, Photoshop also has a leading price.  Unless you qualify for a heavy discount, the full cost of the latest version is over £500.  For this you get a state of the art product, but one that you may only use for less than state of the art projects. 

So instead of photoshopping in Photoshop, why not use a free product?

Most people basically need just a few functions, most probably

• The ability to crop and resize photos
• Filters to adjust brightness and contrast
• The option to save an image in different formats, jpeg, png and so on
• The ability to compress the image for use on websites
• Perhaps a simple retouch tool to remove small errors on the image and get rid of ‘red eye’

Anything above that is overkill for most users and requires a steep learning curve. So why pay a small fortune in order to do these few simple tasks?  Here are 4 free options that not only do the basics, but have a few other bells and whistles as well. 

paint.net is for Windows only, and requires the installation of the .net framework.  Don’t be put off by this; the .net framework is often already installed, and if not paint.net will install or update it automatically.  With paint.net you can do all the basics easily, and also work with layers giving you the ability to work with different objects in the same image. http://www.getpaint.net/

Irfan View (Windows only) has been around for a long time, but is still very popular (over a million downloads every month since 2003!)  It not only covers all the basics, but also gives you the option to add plugins for greater flexibility.  If you are doing the same thing to a number of files such as making them all the same size, then Irfan View has a batch processing option that makes this a breeze. http://www.irfanview.com/

The Gimp (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) is available for Linux, Mac and Windows.  Its floating windows are not to everyone’s liking, but The Gimp is a very powerful program that can do almost everything that Photoshop can do, including using Photoshop plug-ins on the Windows and Linux versions. 

Picasa from Google (Windows only) is a brilliant photo cataloguing tool.  You can create albums, synchronize them to the web and carry out non destructive photo editing.  The latest version (version 3) has one of the best retouching tools I’ve ever used.

All the programmes above are free, widely used and well documented. So before you spend a fortune on Photoshop, why not give them a go? 

See more at http://www.movabletype.org/opensource/

It’s obviously early days, but I think this may be that rare beast; simple to use software from Microsoft that does what you want with little fuss.  The software has been in development for some time, and while that may not mean much when it comes to Microsoft (how long was Vista in development?), on this occasion it seems to have produced something that works out of the box. 

So far I’ve set it up to post articles to the phlex blog.  You can set up connections to a several blogs and switch between them.

Posting comments on line can be a frustrating business, mostly because the amount of screen space given over to the text editor in WordPress or other platforms is so small.  Windows Live Writer gives you a clean, uncluttered workspace; practically everything can be hidden.  There is a spell checker and various other utilities that help to speed up workflow, but no word count. 

If the wysiwyg approach is not for you then there is always the option of working directly in HTML; Windows Live Writer also claims to render correctly formed XHTML if required. 

Windows Live Writer is part of Windows Live, and to get it you have to go through a couple of hurdles, not least of which is registering for or remembering a previously registered Windows Live ID.  Make sure to only select Live Writer in your download, otherwise you will end up with several other Live applications which may or may not prove to be so useful. 

OK, its Microsoft and goes against the current trend for online applications, but it works. And its not as if you tied in to using it – you always write posts using another method whenever you want. 

But if you ignore the word ‘blog’ and consider what is actually happening, you see millions of people actively engaged in on-line publishing.  And while it may be the case many blogs, perhaps the vast majority, are no more than cyber-narcissism, there are many others that offer useful insight and comment.  Blogging is rapidly democratising the media. 

But more than that, the tools used for blogging such as WordPress  have moved beyond simple ‘web logs’ or diaries, and have become much more powerful publishing tools.  The ability to add static pages, photo albums, calendars and so on, blurs the difference between blogging software and content management systems.