I could just sit, look at and feel Little Girls' RUBBER PANTIES all day
JAVASCRIPT SLIDESHOW
Drawing, Image editors & display
If you use graphic to any significant degree on the web, whether for photography, drawing or both, then you appreciate good image editors. These are our picks to be part of the audio graphics package called FairyWand. Learn why they are the best. Taken as a whole, you can do just about anything you wish with these. Bear in mind they are freeware so you can not expect the levels of performance of Photoshop or ArtRage, but you're not paying 100+USD, either
You even get a chance to see for youself
UPDATE: Some of these do not work well or at all in Windows 7 so we have suggested replacements that are pretty much the same: unFreez and iwebalbum
We would like to have recommended GIMP but it has the known bug which makes the tooltip unreadable and it seems has not been fixed for a long time and will not be fixed any time soon
Paint.NET is derived from Microfot Paint. and is a more sophisticated version. It allows for better adjustment of the tool size, accepts and uses plugins for expandability, supports infinite undo, uses layers and has more control over things. On the other hand, the airbrush is gone. There is also a set of effects not found in paint and a forum which features a place where persons can get effects, filters and other plugins. There are PDF manuals available for download on the web
Though this is the most complex program in terms of code, it is the easier to review. It is a GIF animator. You have seen animated GIF's used for things like avatars and moving images. I am sure and must have wondered how to do that. Well this bit of freeware is how you can do it.
And quite easily; just two wizards and the deed is done. Easy-peasy lemon squeezy. the hardest part of the whole operation will be making the images to animate. This is what I used to make the image links that you see here that changed pictures. Also, you can animate the background (Using BODY background= instaed of bgcolor=), the main image or BOTH! The only thing you need to know is that a "layer" is an image. 10 layers means 10 images. This means that the final prduct, though called a "gif" is actually a meta-file called an "anigif [animated gif"], which , in the hands of a competent person, creates a little cartone
JAVASCRIPT SLIDESHOW
If you have seen the rubber panty slideshow, then you have seen this. I got it from the place mentioned on it. I then adapted it to have an optional music track. This is a bit harder to use than the animated GIF program because you actually must go into the code but none of these require you to be any good with code, just put things where you are told, how you are told and that is all because I went and marked everything. It is also a bit more cumbersion since the images and music must be stored in the sam folder. I use it because the IrfanView slideshow does not work quite right for me wien you add music (but it does make a wonderful scrensaver so it is still an advantage). This is a template, which means you do not use it directly. Just copy and paste the code into a new document and do the work in that document
IRFANVIEW IMAGE EDITOR
If you do graphics, digital photography or anything with digital images and do not wish to spend a fortune on image editors, then this is the one for you. I got it to create icons (".ico"). I have used it to salvage a badly White Balance'd image. It challenges serval good programs: ByLight 20/20. L-vIEW pRO, Microsoft Photo Editor, Picassa editor and Corel Ulead Photo Explorer. It has a one-touch macro like MPE's Auto correct that is almost as good. It puts the color, brgihtness contrast, saturation and gamma correct on the same console and unlie the others which use a "hue" contorl, this gives you Red, Blue and Green level sliders. You can use the slideshow function to make a screensaver simply by saving as .SCR. The image resizer enables you to enlarge an image to several times its size without making the rounded edges look blocky or with any significan blurring. You can put images together to create a panarama. and batch-convert files to the same file type. The screensaver/slideshow and batch convert work pretty much on pshbutton consoles: find the items you want to work with, copy themn to a queue with one-touch ease, select a few options like save to and screen size and go. The Save as option offers many file types including ico (icon). While it does not do gif animation, it does display animated gifs in action and lets you set transparency for GIF' files.
Now comes the crazy part. The Effects. Somewhere down toward the bottom of the Image Menu. you have the effects option that shows the usual suspects like 3D button, emoboss and Pixilate. At the top of this submenue is "Effects Browser". This opens up a console with about 30 choices of effects. The aforementioned ones and things like metallic, rock sharpen and solarize. But here is the really good part when you used these effects you get two views of the image you are working with a before and after and more options that begin with a way to adjust the amount of the effect with a slider and amount display. This makes it as good as the Ulead Photo Explorer. The settings you put in stay there after you close this function so it is called Effects setup. Two of the effects in the browser are Edge detection and find edge. These can be the basis of converting an image to a line art sketch. All that is needed to be done to finish that is some use of the Color console (saturation and gamma correct) and Decrease color depth to black and white and if you use Edge detection and not Find edge, you will need to use Negative. The only editors that have sketch are 20/20 which has it as a one-touch, the old GIFWorks website, now gone and an older version of microsoft Photo Editor. While IrfanView lacks this as a one-touch item, you can make better sketches than the 20/20 gives you so you have a trade off, not much more work but better quality
Then why did I give it just short of five tiaras. Well it gets 5 for versatility. It does just about everything well, no less than a B-. The animator and slideshow are one trick ponies and do them as well as they can be done. I judged this one against an imaginary editor that had it all. The lack of one-touch sketch and the unsatifactory way the slidesho handled music take it down a smidgeon. It is closer to 5 tiaras than to 4 and any meainingful fraction and it can replace 4 or 5 image editors. another minus is that there is no save-on-exit option so you will have to get used to saving/saving as before you leave. On the plus side is that it does multimedia which means audio and video, using Windows media Player and QuickTime plugis of which there are many inclluding some Paint Shop Pro and Photoshpp capabilities. It does everything well and some things superbly and some things that others do not do at all. There is alos a Paint section. You can pretty much dispense with other image editors and you can definitely set this as your default image editor. This, too, is given as freeware, or I would not be distributing it as I do. BUT you can and ought to register. Even for non-commercial use, it is worth the small price of 10 Euros via PayPal as opposed to the several times that amount that you would pay for other image editors and the money supports upgrades and improvements. Versatility is A+ and fucntionality is B- to A+. When something that versatile starts at B- and ends at A+ you definitel have a diamond tiara.
Ever see those website albums with the little picutres called "thumbnails" that you click on and you get a bigger version of the same. When you have only a few pictures. that is something you can probably do quickly but what if you have two or three dozen pictures> And those galleries do sometimgs look gorgeous. HERE IS WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT
Well FairyWand has that to. It is called GALLERY WIZARD. Using a wizard you create everything and set it up then move it to your website via a built-in FTP program. You can set up some pretty advanced looking galleries, too. The one I set up was just a try-out and it is pretty good for a first-timer.