Bontok

Pixlr is an incredibly powerful and feature loaded free image editing software. Simple and intuitive, this beast of an application lets you fine tune your digital images to the absolute maximum, thanks to the truckload of tools that it comes built-in with. Pixlr consists all of the standard image editing features (auto adjust, crop/resize, exposure control, red-eye reduction), and then some more. Apart from that, it can prettify your images using a large variety of filters, overlay masks, borders, stickers, and a whole lot of other goodies. You can also add text to your images. Pixlr is a lightweight application, and supports all common image formats (JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP and even PSD). Pixlr has been available as a web based app for quite a while. So how exactly is the desktop version of this thing? Time to find out!

Pixlr: Installation And Primary User Interface

Installing Pixlr is a fairly routine affair, akin to installing any other software application. All you have to do is download the software, and install it. Here’s how Pixlr’s primary user interface looks like:

As illustrated by the above screenshot, Pixlr has an easy to use and straightforward interface. Majority of the UI just consists of the preview area, where the images to be edited show up. All of the primary editing options sit on the left, stacked in the form of a vertical bar. Clicking each option reveals further sub-options (e.g. The Fast option includes standard editing features like resize, auto-contrast, and more). Some of these expand further to reveal even more options. There’s also a simple menu bar up top that can be used to access (most) of the editing options in a bit more standard way. A status bar, having usual social sharing options and some other stuff sits at the bottom, completing the user interface. Pretty standard stuff!

How To Jazz Up Your Images With Pixlr Image Editing Software?

Using Pixlr to edit your images and add amazing effects to them is ridiculously easy. All you have to do is load up the image you want to edit, make your modification(s) and save the changes. Though it’s not possible to discuss each and every feature available in Pixlr due to the sheer number, but they’re all the same essentially. Here’s a little step by step process anyway, to get you started with this amazing image editing application.

Step 1: Load the image that you want to edit in Pixlr using File > Open. A preview of the image is rendered in the preview area as soon as it’s loaded.

Step 2: Now, the next step is obviously to make the changes to the images. To do so, select one of the primary options, and then select a sub-option. For example, you can click on refine, and then choose from one of the options: color, contrast, blur, sharpen, smooth or double exposure. Once selected, you can also fine tune the way the editing operation is applied via sliders. Check out the screenshot below:

As illustrated by the above screenshot, the applied editing effects are rendered to the image preview in real-time, so that you can easily see how the image will look after editing. Pretty awesome, right?

Step 3: That’s all there’s to it! Once you’ve made all the changes that you want to the image, simply use the Save as option from the File menu to commit the changes. Simple as pie!

Pixlr: Summary Of Features

The editing features available in Pixlr are organized into categories for easy navigation. These are briefly summarized below:

Get Pixlr for Desktop Here.

IceCream is a free iPhone camera app to take photos and store them directly to the cloud. It helps you free up your iPhone’s space by backing up all your photos to the cloud (IceCream secure cloud) directly. The best part is that it leaves low resolution version of the photos in your phone as well, so that you can anytime see the photos. Those photos occupy very less space on your phone. Original high resolution photos can be downloaded from the cloud anytime you want. Best of all the worlds.

Another interesting feature of the app is that it actually comes with its own built-in camera. So, if you take a photo using its camera, the photo is automatically uploaded to its cloud, and optimized version of the photo is left on your phone.

The following screenshot shows the photos stored in the IceCream cloud.

The app tells you that how much space you have left for taking photos and how much space you can free up by uploading your photos online. It comes with a built-in camera using which you can take high-resolution photos and store them directly to the IceCream cloud absolutely free. You can take more photos than usual, as all the photos taken by the IceCream camera will be stored in the app without eating up your iPhone’s storage. No more deleting photos, as you can use this amazing app to free up iPhone’s space by storing the photos to the cloud. It works exactly like other iPhone apps, which enable you to sync photos to the cloud.

Similar to the core cloud services, “IceCream” provides one of the best and secure cloud services for storing your photos. The most interesting feature of this app is that you can invite friends to view your photos or share your photos with them via email. You might have used many camera apps for iPhone, but this app comes with some advanced features, which the other apps lack.

How to Take Photos and Store them directly to the Cloud:

Download and install the app from the link provided at the end of this post or from the App Store.

Let us see the steps for using this free iPhone app.

How to use the built-in camera:

Simply tap the camera icon at the bottom of the app interface to open up the IceCream camera. This built-in camera captures high-resolution photos and stores them directly to the cloud. The camera has an option to toggle between classic camera mode and shoot-and-send mode. In the classic camera mode, the photos will be stored online if you’re connected to the internet or else the photos will be stored in your camera roll. But the shoot-and-send mode can be used to share your photos with others as soon as you capture them. The following screenshot shows how to use the built-in camera.

How to free up iPhone’s space:

The app tells you how many photos you will be able to capture with the available iPhone’s space. You can free up space by syncing your photos to the cloud and removing them from your camera roll. All of the stored photos in the app will be viewable even when you’re not connected to the internet. The resolution of the photos doesn’t get affected much and the photos remain beautifully optimized when you’re offline. The following screenshot shows the recommendation of freeing up space and number of photos which can be taken using IceCream camera.

How to send and share photos:

You can send up to 20 photos at once to your friends either by email or by inviting them (IceCream users) to your IceCream account. So no more saving photos to your camera roll to share them, as this app allows you to do so directly from the cloud after capturing a photo. When you invite others to your IceCream account, they will be able to see your photos and share their photos with you as well.

How to download original photos:

Whenever you try to download the original photos from the cloud, you will be provided a code via SMS to your registered phone number. As soon as you feed the code in the app, you can download the original photos. In order to keep your photos private and safe, it uses two-factor authentication, which means before you download a photo, you have to feed the code sent to you.

My Final Verdict:

IceCream is definitely one of the best camera apps for iPhone to take photos and sync them directly to the cloud. It helps you free up iPhone’s space without losing your precious photos. Personally, I like this app because it allows us to view our photos even when we are not connected to the internet and also without affecting the resolution much.

Try this app from the link here.

These image files are supported by many digital equipments, say digital camera, scanner, etc., and most of the photo editors don’t support these formats. These software will help you to view as well as edit different formats RAW images, like *.nef, *.raw, *.crw, *.rwz, and more. Using these software, you will be able to enhance your unprocessed RAW images, apply effects, crop, resize, and rotate them. Most of these software also let you set output quality when converting the image as jpg file. Let’s have a look at these free RAW photo editor software.

Apart from this, you can set Exposure level by maintaining the brightness, contrast, saturation, reduce noise from your image, and view exif information. So almost all the features that are possible with above-mentioned software are available in this software as well. After editing the images, you can save them as TIFF, PNG, and JPEG.

RawTherapee is an advanced photo editor in this list and more useful for experts. It comes with a complicated interface with a bunch of tools. You can add multiple RAW images, other format images, and can process any image using its tools. You can flip, rotate image, crop and resize, tag photos, add color labels to images, etc.

Fotor

Fotor is also helpful to create photo collage using templates or in freestyle mode. Moreover, you can also set custom background color of your photo collage. So it is an all in one image processing software. After editing the images, you can save the images as JPG, BMP, TIFF, and PNG.

Fotor is one of the best photo editors in this list that supports RAW images and other common format images, like JPG, PNG, BMP, etc. It provides batch image convert, rename and resize features. Apart from this, it comes with preset effects to retouch your photos by just using mouse clicks. For any applied effect, you will be able to set the intensity level.

There are many other important features available to use. You can add borders, text to your photos, crop images, rotate and zoom images, compare original and enhanced photo, view exif information of images, etc.

Scarab Darkroom

This software also provides presets to crop image and save to PC. Apart from this, you can perform multiple adjustments to enhance the image. You can move sliders to set contrast, tint, contrast, vibrance, temperature, hue, sharpness, etc.

While editing a particular photos, you can also explore metadata information to check the focal length, flash used or not, ISO speed, photo taken date, and more. So this lite version of this software is good enough to perform quick editing and exploring the photo details.

Scarab Darkroom (lite version) is also a good software to edit *.nef format and other RAW images supported by multiple digital cameras. This software is also a good RAW image resizer and converter. You can set custom height/width and save image as tif or jpg format. You need to drag n drop images or the whole folder and it will show thumbnails of RAW images on the bottom part.

XnConvert

There are three main tabs on its interface that makes it easy to work. First tab is used to insert images and view thumbnails of images. Second tab helps to add tasks to process the input images. You can add tasks to change color depth, canvas size of images, enhance focus, edges, resize, rotate, apply watermark, and more.

After applying a task, you can also preview original and output image. Finally, you can jump to the third tab to select output format and convert your raw images.

XnConvert is also a feature-rich image editor and image converter software. It supports around 500 image formats which none of the other software in this list do.

Able RAWer

Apart from this, you can also automatically adjust colors of an image in a single-click. Moreover, option to set bluescale, redscale, etc. is also available to retouch your photo.

Other interesting features of this software are: crop and resize image, use preset filters, preview the output image before applying the changes, and save image in any other format. Supported output formats are JPG, PCX, TGA, BMP, PBM, GIF, and more.

Able RAWer is another handy RAW image editor that provides navigation pane to open images directly using its interface. Unique feature of this software is that you can preview original and output image side by side while enhancing or setting the adjustments for contrast, HSV, Gamma correction, sharpness, etc.

Whether you have to retouch your RAW images, resize, rotate, set exposure, etc., these software can come in handy. These all are good software to process RAW images and commonly used image formats.