The Photo Editor

The Photo Editor enables you to tweak and improve a photo from our library or one that you have uploaded yourself to make it "just right" for your web page. 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 focus of the image to ensure that the photo looks just as you want it to appear on your page. The preview changes on the fly as you enter new settings. You can preview your changes at all times, and if you're not happy with how a photo is coming out, you can undo your last move, or reset the image back to its original, pre-altered state.

There are six tabs in the Photo Editor that section the editing options:

Options in 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 one of the resizing options is changed, the other one will be increased in proportion. If this box is not checked, then when one of the resizing options is changed, the other one will not resize with it.

Options in the Crop Tab:

Top and Left

By changing these settings, you are able to dictate how many pixels from the top and how many pixels from 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

By changing these settings, you are able to dictate 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

Resets the image back to the default before any cropping.

Additionally it is possible to crop the preview image yourself. Simply hold down your mouse button on one of the 8 "grip" points and drag the box to wherever you wish to crop. The grey area dictates the area to be cropped. When you are happy with the intended area to be cropped, click on the Crop button.

Options in 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.

Options in the Settings Tab:

Contrast

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

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 dark or in shadow.

There is also an Auto-Enhance button, which will attempt to enhance your photos automatically to the best level of quality - for example, this may take the form of automatically increasing the brightness on a darker photo. You can see the changes that the Auto-Enhance button makes to the photo as the sliders will change accordingly.

Options in the Effects Tab:

Color Filter

Creates a shaded overlay of the photo to the chosen color.

Monochrome

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

Sepia

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

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

RRegions 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.

Options in the Display Tab:

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 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: Small is 100px, Medium is 150px and Large is 200px (the height of each image will scale accordingly with the width).

Caption

Add the caption that will be displayed on the full sized slideshow image here.

In addition to the editing options, there are 5 buttons that are onscreen at all times:

Save

This saves the changes you made to the image and places it on the page where requested. You can select save at any time so we have included that option in each tab, for speed simply select save when you have finished all of your edits.

Undo

This disregards the last change made and puts the image back to the previous step.

Redo

If something was undone, this will put the last change to the photo back.

Reset

This will reset the photo to its original, pre-edited state.

Change

This will replace your image from another, and will take you to the Selection Box where you can choose one of the images from our vast resource library, or one of your own from your File Manager.