Cloud Canvas is a free online image editing and image creation tool. Cloud Canvas fits in a niche somewhere between a simple drawing tool and a full-blown image editor like Aviary. If all you need is a tool for drawing simple pictures and diagrams, Cloud Canvas has you covered. If you need to do some basic work with vectors and layers, Cloud Canvas can help you there too. If you have photos or drawings that you want to edit, you can do that with Cloud Canvas.

Cloud Canvas uses HTML5 instead of Flash so you should be able to use it on the iPad. Cloud Canvas integrates with your Google Docs account so that when you save an image edited in Cloud Canvas it is saved and accessible in your Google Docs account. You can also export your images as PNG files.

Radical Image Optimization Tool (RIOT for short) is a free image optimizer that will let you to visually adjust compression parameters while keeping minimum filesize. It uses with a side by side (dual view) or single view interface to compare the original with the optimized image in real time and instantly see the resulting file size.

It is lightweight, fast and simple to use, yet powerful for advanced users. You will be able to control compression, number of colors, metadata settings and much more, and select image format (JPG, GIF or PNG) for your output file.

Main features:

• Open many image types including rare/scientific types.
• Save and optimize JPEG, GIF and PNG with a simple, clean user interface.
• Works in dual view: (original – optimized image) or single view (optimized image).
• Automatic preview of resulting image.
• In-place compare function (alternativelly display the original image over the optimized image to notice small pixel changes).
• Compress files to desired filesize threshold.
• Fast processing (all is done in memory).
• See instant results including resulting filesize.
• Batch support (process multiple files at once).
• Transparency handling options.
• Decide if you want to keep metadata (comments, IPTC, Adobe XMP, EXIF profiles, ICC profiles).
• Unsupported metadata is removed.
• Transfer metadata between image formats (destination format must support them).
• Common tools: pan and zoom, rotate, flip.
• Basic image adjustments: brightness, contrast, gamma, invert.
• Visually reduce number of unique colors for PNG and GIF images in order to reduce filesize.
• Two quantization methods are available: Xiaolin Wu and NeuQuant neural net.
• Resize image by using well known resample filters (ex: Lanczos3, Catmull Rom, Bicubic, and others).
• Out-of-the-box support for external PNG optimizers (optipng, pngout, etc).
• The compression and the results are comparable to those of commercial products, even higher.
• Adaptive logarithmic tone mapping algorithm (Drago) used for HDR images.

]]> http://helpwebdesigners.com/radical-image-optimization-tool-riot-a-free-image-optimizer.html/feed 0 http://helpwebdesigners.com/iconfinder-download-free-icons.html http://helpwebdesigners.com/iconfinder-download-free-icons.html#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 03:41:40 +0000 herbertaqp http://helpwebdesigners.com/?p=364

Iconfinder provides high quality icons for webdesigners and developers in an easy and efficient way. IconFinder is an icon search engine which launched in 2007 with the goal to supply webdesigners and developers with icons. With millions on icons downloaded every month it is among the most popular icon sites.

The main interface of IconFinder is much like Google. It has alot of white-space, a big logo and the search box. There is of course some stats about how many icons they have indexed. When you search for an icon it comes up with all the search results in beautiful boxes. There are literally hundreds of icons per search.

Below the searchbar (after you have performed a search) are options you can configure to filter your search results. These include how many icons you want to list per page and the background colour of the icon. When viewing an icon, you can see everything about it. You can download each icon in .png or .ico. Also, below the icon listing, there is a box that lists all the other icons that the set contains.

Qvectors is the place to find all the quality free Vector images & graphics from around the web. It is an excellent collection of vector graphics that not only impact its design and quality, but also because most of them are distributed free, usually under Creative Conmmon.

The collection of vector images are organized by categories and tags, including a search engine to facilitate the task. The main categories following the next topics: Illustrations, Icons, Abstract, Objects & Elements, Nature and Silhouettes. A designers that create an image vector can publish it in Qvectors completing a form.

Thumba is a free online image editor. It’s fast, intuitive and has a lot of adjustments and effects that can be applied on your images. You’ll encounter adjustments such: auto correction, brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, color inversion, etc… You’ll also encounter tools like crop, resize, image analysis, a lot of brushes, etc… And a lot of effects such: artistics, distortion, sharpen, blur, etc…

Thumba is provided in English and in Portuguese, other languages will be provided soon. Note: Silverlight 3 is needed to view Thumba. You’ll be redirect to Microsoft page automatically if you don’t have it installed on your PC.

It lets you crop images, blur, flip, add effects and add stylised effects to the pictures. You might also want to check out the 3D effect which turns an existing image in to a 3D one to be viewed with the blue-red glasses.

PatternWall is a fresh website which features a huge collection of free seamless patterns to beautify your designs & website backgrounds. Patternwall has a really neat system for picking a pattern, simply click on a swatch to see it and click the download text to download the pattern you want; I chose to open this JPG file with Illustrator since that’s where we’re going to using it.

There are a number of styles of patterns including plaid, grunge, shapes, and stripes. I really wish the patterns were in a higher resolution. Some of them are very blurry and even unusable, but I can only expect that to change with time. This is a new site and I’m interested to see if they’ll add more patterns periodically and/or how they will fix the quality issues plaguing the site currently.

Pattern is a Tumblr-based site that displays about 100 different tile-able patterns that can be used on any projects you see fit. The best part is there is no sign-up and you just click, download, and you’re done.Patterns are free to use both in personal & commercial projects.

Imagicon is a graphics utility designed to convert multiple image files from BMP, JPG or PNG image formats into any of the following image formats (24-bit): Windows or OS/2 Bitmap (BMP), Independent JPEG Group (JPG), Portable Network Graphics (PNG) and Windows Icon (ICO). With Imagicon Windows Icons will be saved using 32-bit colour depth.

Options are available to enable alpha transparency of icons and to define the mask colour used. The user can select to save icons with the following dimensions in pixels: 16 x 16, 32 x 32, 48 x 48, 64 x 64 and 128 x 128.

Imagicon also features the ability to drag ‘n’ drop multiple images for faster processing. Full instructions are included with the software, explaining each of the possible settings and the function that they perform.

Websnapr lets you capture screenshots of (almost) any web page. Allow your visitors to instantly visualize any web page before clicking. Increase site traffic, click-through rate and site stickiness. WebSnapr also provides us the WebSnapr Preview Bubble which is a simple, unobtrusive script used to display an overlay bubble showing a hyperlink target thumbnail using WebSnapr.

Websnapr’s basic services are completely free of charge. We provide 100,000 snapshot impressions for our free users per month. Websites containing illegal, adult or offensive contents are not allowed. To start capturing your screenshots.

Feature Overview

• Choose between different thumbnails sizes: micro (90×70), small (202×152), medium (400×300), or large (640×480).
• WebSnapr Addons / Plugins: WordPress plugins, browser addons, browser bookmarklet, windows live writer plugin, Drupal modules, and PostNuke plugins. Very simple to implement.
• Over 300 million generated thumbnails (according to Websnapr).

]]> http://helpwebdesigners.com/websnapr-website-thumbnails-website.html/feed 5 http://helpwebdesigners.com/live-banner-maker-create-share-free-banners-online.html http://helpwebdesigners.com/live-banner-maker-create-share-free-banners-online.html#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:40:58 +0000 herbertaqp http://helpwebdesigners.com/?p=318

Live Banner Maker is an easiest way to create free banners online. This web service lets you make your own customized banners of different sizes and embed or share them online on your website, Blog, Myspace, Facebook, and more. This online banner generator can create banners in 5 simple steps. The created banners can be used for displaying any advertisements or to publicize anything online.

Great Features

• Select Banner Size or Create custom
• Upload Background image or add color
• Add You Banner Text
• Add Banner Effect
• Upload Image
• Save Or Download Your Created Banner

Texture Lovers Its purpose is to archive some of the best free textures from around the web and better yet only archive the ones that are free to use in commercial and personal work without worrying about giving credit to the source (no attribution). On this site you will also find links to inspiration and tutorials all texture related.

The textures are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, usually you would have to give attribution to who created the textures but the kind people featured on the site have waived the need for attribution which enables you to optionally give credit to them if you use their textures.

The textures are free to use, but any inspiration or tutorials on this site are very much copyrighted material and should not be re-produced in any way, they are here to learn from and gain inspiration not copy from, please respect that.