20 Years of Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing software developed and marketed by Adobe Systems. It is the current market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation software, and is the flagship product of Adobe Systems.

Read the rest of this entry »

imgopt – PNG And JPEG Image Optimization

Imgopt is a bash script that makes use of different image optimization command line tools to drastically reduce the size of your JPEG and PNG images with minimal loss in quality.
Read the rest of this entry »

ZScreen – An Open Source Screen Capture Tool For Windows

ZScreen is an open source screen capture tool for Windows. However, unlike other screen capture tools, ZScreen is much more versatile.

ZScreen is developed  in Microsoft  C# 3.0 language and requires .NET 3.5 framework to run. If you are a Linux user, you should take a look at Shutter which is also as powerful as ZScreen.

Read the rest of this entry »

Phatch – Batch process thousands of images at once

Phatch is a photo batch processor with a nice graphical user interface. It supports all popular image formats and can duplicate folder hierarchies which makes it ideal for identically manipulating 1000s of images in one go. It can also be used to rename exif data in your photos. Phatch is based on Python and will work in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Read the rest of this entry »

Save for Web GIMP Plugin

If you are using GIMP to create images or pictures for the web, then this GIMP plugin comes really handy.  It is called Save for Web plugin. Normally, when you save your images (pictures, photos) in GIMP, it produces images of large file size even 100s of  kilobytes.  However, hosting images of such large sizes on the web is not optimal as it slows the loading of  web page.
Read the rest of this entry »

Photo Retouching Tutorial in Photoshop

This is an excellent video tutorial on photo retouching. Here the author explains how to use Photoshop to remove the flash hotspots you encounter in your photos when you shoot pictures.
Read the rest of this entry »

pngcrush – Image Optimizer for PNG Graphics

pngcrush is a command line image optimizer for PNG graphics files. It optimizes a PNG graphics file by reducing the size of the file’s IDAT chunk. Pngcrush is not installed by default in Linux, but it is available in the repositories of most Linux distributions. In Ubuntu Linux, you can install pngcrush by running the following command :
Read the rest of this entry »

Shutter – Screenshot Capture Tool

Shutter is a free screenshot capture tool for GNU/Linux. It has almost all the features of professional screenshot tools such as SnagIT. Shutter was formerly named GScrot (Not to be mistaken with scrot ). Using Shutter, you can take a screenshot of a specific area, window, your whole screen, or even of a website – apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then upload to an image hosting site, all within one window.
Read the rest of this entry »

Mogrify – How to resize images from the command line

In Linux, if you have installed ImageMagick suite, you can use a nifty command to resize images, photos or pictures. The name of the command line tool is mogrify. Here is how it is done.

Suppose you want to resize all your images to a size of 800×600.

You open a terminal and navigate to the directory containing your images, photos or pictures.

Create a directory in the location named “resized-pictures” as follows :

$ mkdir resized-pictures

Now run the mogrify command from the same location.

$ mogrify -path ./resized-pictures/ -resize 800x600 *.jpg

The above command will resize all the jpeg pictures in the current directory to a 800×600 size and save the output to the resized-pictures/ directory leaving the original pictures  intact.

Note: You can also run the mogrify command without the -path option; in which case, all the images will be resized and overwritten in the current directory itself.

How to stitch pictures using ImageMagick

ImageMagick is a command line graphics suite which allows you to manipulate and retouch your photos in various ways.  It is not installed by default on many Linux distributions but installing it is a simple affair of using their respective package management tool. ImageMagick is also available for Windows.

Here is a simple method of stitching pictures together using one of the tools in ImageMagick graphics suite.

Let’s assume I want to stitch together three pictures namely a.jpg, b.jpg and c.jpg one below the other. Here is how it is done.

$ convert a.jpg b.jpg c.jpg -append abc.jpg

Where, convert is a tool in the ImageMagick suite. abc.jpg is the output picture which is a combination of the three pictures.

Note: In the above command, -append option will stitch the pictures one below the other. But if you want to stitch the pictures together horizontally, use the +append option.