The Photo Editor

The Photo Editor enables you to enhance and prepare your photos for use on your website. It is a powerful, easy-to-use tool where you can resize, crop and rotate the photo, as well as change the contrast, brightness, saturation, hue and sharpness or even add a special effect. The preview changes as you change the settings. If you are not happy with any changes you can undo or reset the image back to its original, pre-altered state.

There are six tabs in the Photo Editor:

The Size Tab:

Width

This resizes the width of the image in pixels.

Height

This resizes the height of the image in pixels.

Keep Proportions

If this box is checked, when the width or height is changed, the other dimension will resize to maintain the correct proportions.

The Crop Tab:

Drag to Crop

You can crop a photo by dragging on one of the corner, side, top or bottom handles. Then click the crop button to execute the crop.

Cropping can also be controlled by these settings:

Top and Left

You can set how many pixels from the top and how many pixels from the left you wish to crop from the photo. Click the Crop button when you have entered the amounts to update the preview image.

Width and Height

You can set the size of the image by cropping either the sides (Width) or the top and bottom (height). This setting will crop an even amount from each side, so for example, if your image was 200 pixels wide and you cropped it to 100 pixels, it would crop 50 on the left and 50 on the right. Click the Crop button when you have entered the amounts to update the preview image.

Reset

To reset the image back to its size before any cropping.

The Rotate Tab:

Rotate 90 degrees left

This will turn the image 90 degrees to the left (so that the top of the image will turn anti-clockwise).

Rotate 90 degrees right

This will turn the image 90 degrees to the right (so that the top of the image will turn clockwise).

Vertical Mirror

This will turn the image down as if you had flipped it vertically.

Horizontal Mirror

This will turn the image horizontally to give a mirror image.

The Settings Tab:

The Auto-Enhance button will attempt to enhance your photos automatically to the best level possible. You can see the changes that the Auto-Enhance button makes to the photo as the sliders will change accordingly.

You can also change each setting individually via a slider:

Contrast

This changes the context of the color to show a greater color difference.

Brightness

This will give the effect of a brighter or duller image.

Saturation

This adjusts the intensity of the color in your image.

Hue

The hue will take the photo through the colour tones of the rainbow.

Blur/Sharpen

This can be used to blur or sharpen an image.

Fill light

This powerful feature will reduce the contrast on a photo and provide some illumination for the areas of the image that are dark or in shadow.

The Effects Tab:

Monochrome

Recolors the photo in greyscale to produce a black and white image.

Sepia

Gives a sepia (shade of brown) tone to the image.

Color Filter

Creates a shaded overlay of the photo to the chosen color. Enter your color in the box next to the color square or click on the square to open the color editor.

Paint

Recreates the image with an oil painting effect.

Charcoal

Recreates the image with a charcoal drawing effect.

Texture

Applies a canvas like texture to the image.

Posterize

Regions of the image with a graduation in tone are replaced with several regions of fewer tones, resulting in an abrupt change from one tone to another. This creates an effect somewhat similar to that of a simple graphic poster.

Emboss

Creates a flat three dimensional image from the original image, using the original outlines and changes in colour as the new outlines.

The Display Tab:

Caption

Add a caption to be displayed on the full sized slideshow image.

Thumbnail

A thumbnail is a small image on your webpage that opens up a much larger image when your visitor clicks on it. When your visitors see the larger image they can select a forward or back or fast forward button to browse through all the images on your webpage as a slideshow (providing they have been created as thumbnails initially). The drop down sets the size of the thumbnail: X-Small is 100px, Small is 150px, Medium is 200px, Large is 250px, X Large is 300px (the height of each image will scale proportionally to the width).

Related articles

• Gallery Editor