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We make a big deal about how you can maintain your website without any additional tools but that's not totally true. It is true that you don't need to buy any additional software.
Image Editor
The first extra tool you'll need is an image editor. You can easily spend hundreds of dollars for a best in class tool but for most people a freeware tool is more than enough.
- Picasa by Google This is a free tool offered by Google and works fine for basic preparation of pictures for web use. You just need to know that resizing and compression is HIDDEN in the File Export function. I spent a long time looking for that.
- GIMP is for those that want a freeware full function image editor. All full function image editors are hard to use but the user interface of this one is confusing at best. This should not be your first experience with image editors unless you are a technical person.
- PhotoShop Elements by Adobe is a popular editor that is a subset of Photoshop and can be purchased for less than $100 in numerous outlets. The best thing about this tool is the availability of the book "Photoshop Elements for Dummies". Armed with that book, a persistent person can work magic with photos.
- MicroSoft Digital Image Pro is a consumer level image editor that is reasonably easy to use if you've used others. It's in the same price range as PhotoShop Elements and sometimes available discounted in stores like Walmart.
- Photoshop CS is the benchmark for image editing. It is difficult to find a digital photo professional that doesn't have this tool. You can buy this at Adobe for $599.
- Resizing is a subset of image editing but it can be very confusing in the image editor. We use a program called pixresizer. It's free and fairly easy to use. You do need to know how big you want your picture. See "Size" below. Go to http://bluefive.pair.com/updates.htm for a free download.
For most people, the tool will be driven by price first. Picasa is a nice place to start to see how far you want to go in image editing. When you want to do something Picasa can't do, you can go searching for your next tool. Unfortunately, there are too many tools out there for us to provide you any training on the use of these tools.
Size
The issue of image size is always a question. A useful tool for this is a screen caliper. This tool lets you measure your screen so you just go to the webpage where you plan to put the picture, put the jaws of the caliper over the space you want to fill and a little number tells you how many pixels the space is. You need that number for the "Resizer" above. We use a free tool from Iconico called Screen Calipers. Go to http://www.iconico.com/caliper/index.aspx for a free download.
Color Tools
The web defines colors in code so it is precise but confusing to most people. If you want to set a background color in a table, the interface expects you to type something that looks like #23DEC1. Intuitive, right? If you want us to make the header a certain color, you can't say "pink". Fortunately, there are a few freeware tools to help.
- Color Cop is a very cool tool that helps copy a color you see on your monitor. This tool has an eyedropper tool to pass over a section of your monitor. It gives a hexadecimal number close to the color you see. It is exact if the color is a single color and an approximation if what you see is actually a mixture of different colored dots. This tool needs to be downloaded.
- Navsurf Color Picker is a web based tool that allows you to wander a cursor over a color map until you the color you want shows in a box. One weakness of this tool is the small box. It's like the color chips you get at the paint store.
- Pagetutor Color Picker II is similar but can show color contrasts. You can pick a background color and text color to see if they look OK together or if they are even legible. This also shows you a larger area of color. The "hex" code is not as obvious in this tool. They're show as three sets of two next to the name define such as "background".
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