I promise not to say anything about a picture being worth a thousand words, but in today’s ‘attention economy’ using images in our communications online or off is more important than ever in attracting attention. This is a round-up of some of the free graphics tools that various folks have recommended to me including some sources for copyright free images. Some of them are really easy to use and some of them are geared to professional quality image editing. In any case, I hope you find some useful gems that you haven’t heard about yet.

Image Editing

Pixlr

TechSoup’s web content developer, Wes Holing, is a big fan of Pixlr Editor free online photo editor from Autodesk. Here’s what he says: “I use it when I’m on a computer without Photoshop and need to crop or resize an image. You can save the image onto your PC and then use it however you want.” It has a Photoshop type interface with all the different tools, basic menus, plus things like layers.

Pixlr Express is a simpler more intuitive interface for those who don’t know Photoshop. It offers a number of ways to resize, adjust and add effects to images. It’s the simplest tool I‘ve found to add a caption to an image to make an Internet meme. They have some great examples on the Pixlr blog as well. There’s a mobile version of Pixlr Express for Android and iPhone.

Pixlr-o-matic is a free online tool that adds special effects, like making photos look antique. It is available online and also as a download, on Facebook, as a Chrome web app and mobile app for iOS or Android devices.

I have to say that this is the easiest to use image editor I’ve seen so far. The website has a support page where you can ask questions.

PicMonkey

NetSquared organizer, Eli van der Giessen’s personal favorite free lightweight online image editor is PicMonkey. It’s also very intuitive for non-Photoshop users for cropping, resizing, sharpening, and rotating images. This software is a classic freemium service, providing basic features for free, but the more interesting effects are only available for a  $5 per month subscription. Some of the free services I like are the different frames you can put around a photo, text captioning, the ease of sharpening a blurry photo, and a feature under ‘image setting’ that allows you to adjust the file size of the image so you can use it for the web or make it email-able. I also like the very easy collages you can make with this free tool.

GIMP

GIMP is the primary Photoshop freeware clone for photo retouching and resizing, creating images from scratch, and converting formats like bmp, gif, jpeg, png, psd, almost everything. This software pretty much requires some familiarity with Photoshop. The paint function has painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, gradient editor and blending tool

It’s a free download for most computer OS platforms like Mac, Linux, and Windows, and is available in several languages as well. It apparently works in Windows 7, but not Windows 8 as yet. There isn’t a mobile version yet, but there is something called Gimp Portable that fits on a flash drive that you can plug in to a Windows PC. I had a hard time getting it to install on a Mac, but on Windows was fine.

I particularly like the feature overview page that shows in pictures the kinds of things you can do with GIMP. It’s not super easy to use, but it has lots of assistance like help files, a user manual and online resources such as tutorials, a wiki, documentation (in 11 languages), forums, FAQs, tips etc.

A good place to start is the Lifehacker Learn the Basics of Photoshop: The Complete Guide. You can download all the guides here. The Learn the Basics of Photoshop in Under 25 Minutes is really useful. It describes most of the major Photoshop tools. There’s also the GIMP Basics tutorial, which is more geeky, but still manageable. The GIMP Quickie tutorial describes how to do very simple image manipulation in plain language like changing an image size, cropping a photo, flipping an image, and probably the most useful thing: decreasing the file size of a JPEG, for instance a photo taken with a camera, so you can send it through email or use it on the web.

Desktop Publishing And Page Layout Programs

My sense is that page layout or desktop publishing is not so well-known a graphics field as image editing like Photoshop, but it is very useful. It’s actually the thing that put Macintosh on the map in the 80’s. The most famous and full-featured page layout program is Adobe InDesign. Scribus is the primary In-Design freeware clone. Both applications are used to create print documents like flyers, brochures, newsletters, annual reports and full-blown magazines. It also creates digital documents like eBooks, reports, PDFs, and webpages. It does professional color management as well. If you want a document to look professional with images, multi-column layout, sidebars and other design elements it’s worth moving beyond word processing to page layout.

Scribus is a free open source application. It is not a cloud application. It’s an application you can download for Intel Mac, Windows (both 32-bit and for newer 64-bit PCs, but not Windows 8 yet) and Linux PCs. It downloaded and installed fine on my Mac. Since I’m familiar with InDesign, it was pretty intuitive to start working with the application. But for those not familiar with InDesign, it is probably necessary to run through the Scribus quick-start guide to get started. I also like Working with Scribus: How to begin on the Scribus Wiki, and also they offer additional free online how-tos and tutorials. It is designed to integrate closely with OpenOffice Suite and GIMP. Just like GIMP, it has a Scribus Portable version that fits on a large capacity USB thumbdrive.

PagePlus Starter Edition is a less functional, but easier to use freeware download. Its maker, Serif, offers several freemium starter edition graphics applications for Windows that are designed to be easy to use like PhotoPlus, DrawPlus, WebPlus, and MoviePlus.

Drawing

Inkscape is another free open-source program that does much of what Adobe Illustrator does. It’s also a nonprofit project. This type of drawing software is used to make logos, infographics, web graphic images, and motion graphics. It creates vector-based images that can scale up to the size of a billboard without losing quality or proportion. Inkspace does a surprising number of things. Like its cousins GIMP and Scribus, it is available as a free download for Intel Mac, Windows (all the way up through Windows 8), and Linux. It is available in the major European languages and also Japanese. The Inkscape Tutorials Blog is a good place to check out to see what the program can do.

Drawing programs are actually a pretty crowded area and include Creative Docs.NET, sK1 and Serif DrawPlus for Windows, Skencil and OpenOffice Draw for Windows, Mac, and Linux, XaraExtreme and Skencil for Linux, and Torapp for the Chrome OS.

Animoto

In the interests of relative brevity, I won’t go in the many free video editing tools available, but I do want to mention a hybrid that is easy to use and creates video slide shows. It’s called Animoto. The lite version is a free online tool that allows you to add titles and music to a succession of photos, and the effect is incredible. My colleague, Ale Bezdikian, whipped one up in about an hour for a story I did on the charity, Gleam of Hope, that supports Haitian orphans. Here’s the link to Ale’s Animoto piece.

Free Images

Anyone with a website, newsletter, or blog these days knows the importance of good attention-getting images or videos. One hurdle in using images is that you need is to buy them from a place like Getty Images, or to get formal permission to legally post them or alter them from the owner - or you could to use copyright free images. At TechSoup we’re big fans of the Flickr's Creative Commons page to find photos and videos we can use. By using the advanced search and clicking "Find content to modify, adapt, or build upon” I can usually find something good that is licensed “Some rights reserved." These are fine for noncommercial use by charities or libraries with attribution to the author.    

For many more leads on where to get copyright-free, or openly licensed images you can use for free on your website or for other purposes, check out our great TechSoup article: Finding and Using Images from the Web. Finally, I’d be remiss to not mention the free Social Image Resizer Tool when you need to quickly resize images for your social media posts.

I’d also hate myself if I didn’t mention the free Worldle Wordcloud online maker. Just type in a bunch of words and it makes an attractive word cloud graphic. Word It Out is another one of these. OK. I have to stop now.

Additional Resources

• TechSoup: Free Infographic Tools for Nonprofits and Libraries
• TechSoup: Web, Multimedia, and Design donations
• TechSoup Canada: Digital Storytelling 101: Photos & Graphics
• TechSoup Canada: Adobe Alternatives: Graphic Editing & Publishing Software
• TechSoup: Finding and Using Images from the Web.
• The Buffer blog: 14 Great Tools to Create Engaging Infographics and Images for your Social Media Posts
• Dream Infinity: Photoshop, Illustrator or Indesign? I really like this piece that demystifies what the major graphics software types actually do.
• Lifehacker: Build Your Own Adobe Creative Suite with Free and Cheap Software

Images:

• Image one: Ianaubry on Flickr Creative Commons
• Image two: John Baer on Flickr Creative Commons
• Image three: Scribus
• Image four: aaipodpics on Flickr Creative Commons
• Image five:  Creative Commons
• image six: Jim Lynch

Do you have any free graphics software that you like and recommend? Please log in to comment.