Graphics
These are some of the websites offering free online graphics/ image editing capability. Please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it if your favourite website/application is missing here.
FixPicture
FixPicture.Org is a FREE online website utility for digital camera owners. Support all popular picture file formats (jpeg, tiff, png, gif, bmp, tga, ...) and camera RAW formats (crw, nef, raf, cr2, dng, ...). More than 400 formats supported.
It has a flash version and an HTML version. HTML version is particularly useful for slow internet connections. You need to firs Choose a picture or a photo that you want to work upon. You have an option to resize the image. You can convert it using the pixels measurement or using the percentage of the size. You can rotate the image 90 Clockwise, Anticlockwise, Flip it horizontal or vertical. You can add several effects to the image such as Automatic Levels, Automatic contrast, Greyscale, Sharpen, Sepia etc.
Finally you can choose the output format from JPEG, PNG, TIFF, PDF, BMP, GIF. You can also choose the quality of the output from Good, Better and Best. The higher the quality, larger the file size.
The difference between Flash and html versions is that in flash you can preview the effects of your settings immediately. Overall this site provides an excellent platform to quickly work on your images before uploading them to a photo sharing website.
You can visit the FixPicture website on this link
Adobe Kuler
kuler.adobe.com is a site for finding out which colors go well together, to find out the color combination that look good together. Probably this is the ultimate tool to find that out. Whether you are painting, making a website, painting your house or need to find out a good color combination for something, this site will help you to find that out. You can find hundreds of color combination that others have discovered and made it availabe on the site, or you can Create a color combination of your own. The functionality is available for everyone, except if you want to save the color combination on adobe's site, you need to get yourself registered, and the registration is free.
Using the color selector:
You will be pleasantly surprized to find out how this site presents you the ease with which you can instantly find out a combination of five colors. All that you need to choose one color as the base color.
There is a color wheel, with five pointer circles on it, one of them being the base color. You can drag, rotate through the spectrum of colors, selecting the intensity and the brightness of the colors. As you move along the combination of colors changing in front of your eyes, finding out a suitable color
combination could not be simpler.
Finding out the color values:
What more, you are instantly presented with the values of the colors in HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value)
RGB (Red, Green Blue) CYMK (CYan, Yellow, Magenta and Black for printing) Lab and HEX (for Html values to be used for websites)
You will be pleasantly surprized to know that there are at least six different ways to combine colors.
These are automated. All that you need is to choose a base color and a Rule.
One is Analogous - Match colors with adjecent hues.
Monochromatic - Focus on one color with varied intensity and lightness in a single hue.
Triad - Space your colors in a triangle around the wheel for a contrasting theme.
Complementary - select two Opposite colors on the wheel for a simple theme based of two hues
Compound - combine colors from multiple hues
Shades - Create variations of the base color's hue
And if that does not give you the right combination, then there is a custom method where you can choose any color of your choice
Selecting colors from an image:
Adobe kuler provides an exciting functionality, and that is to select existing colors form an image. If you want to find out colors from an image, you can upload the image to the Kuler site, or take it from Flickr, and then you will see the image on the site, alongwith five handles, which you can move around in different parts of the image and see which color is used. You can independently select five diferent colors to make it a color combination. Great to create a color combination form a nature photograph.
What more, you can further improvise on the colors using several themes such as Colorful, bright, muted, deep, dark and custom.
Needs registration:
But in order to know the HEX, or RGB, CYMK values of these colors you need to take this combo in edit mode, for that you need to save this theme, and for that you need to have an account with Adobe. The registration is free. So assuming that you have an account, now you should save the theme, and then open it in the edit mode, where you can find the values of the colors so that you can carry them in your applications.
So in my opinion this can prove to be an invaluable tool if you are in a profession where you often need to struggle to find out suitable color combination. I can not imagine any other way once having seen the capabilities of this application. It is simply great. The gift from the digital world to the world of colors.
Eco Friendly:
This application should be considered an eco friendly one like many other digital applications. As this saves the paper, colors and other material if used for similar purposes. Although it should have becomes the de facto standard by now. If you think of the era before computers, and imagine how the color combinations were chosen, then you can appreciate the amount of manual labour, paper , color and other materials such an application has helped us to save. Therefore I would consider it as a classic example of an Eco Friendly application, hence it should be brought to notice of all those who are concerned.
