I have been playing around with Photo editing software for quite long time now, and I always faced problem that not every software support every format. While Googled around I came across FastStone Image Viewer and I didn’t look back. After experimenting around I understood that FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image converter, editor and browser. It does carry amazing array of features, which includes image viewing, comparison, cropping, managing, red-eye removal, renaming, add texts, watermarks, emailing, border effects, color adjustments and many more.

Basic Highlights:

• Relatively fast HQ image/thumbnail viewing
• Support for dual head configuration
• Custom order arranging (via DnD) and automatic renumbering
• Color space management and excellent Magnifier lens
• Portable version can be used without installation, usually installed on USB key, comprising all user settings
• Supports for popular image formats: JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, PSD, BMP, ICO. etc.
• Image browser with familiar Windows user interface
• Full screen viewer with zoom function
• Support folder/non-folder structure
• Neat red eye removal tool that produces natural results
• Image modification tools – resize, rotate, flip, crop, sharpen, blur, brightness etc.
• Image color effects – grayscale, sepia, negative, RGB adjustment
• Best fit or actual image display support
• Image management support – photo tagging capability, drag & drop, copy or move to folder support.

Professional Highlights:

• Supports popular digital camera RAW formats from different SLR manufacturers such as Nikon – NEF, Olympus (ORF), Canon – CR2, Pentax – PEF, and more.
• Eleven different image resize and resampling algorithm options available
• Undo and redo option at Multi level
• Lossless JPEG rotations
• Memory card image retriever
• Special effects for professionals such as watermark – text or pic, footnote, drop down shadow, frame option, bump map, morph, and waves
• Color counter feature comes with Histogram
• Side-by-side image comparison tool (up to 4 at a time)
• Batch image processing options for convert, rename, and more.

Other Cool highlights:

• Slideshow including music and 150 + transition effects
• Image printing with full page layout
• Cool Wallpaper creator and screen capture
• Get image from a scanner support as well
• 9 default skins interface

Most of the wonderful features with FastStone are accessible at huge cost with other software, but this one stand out of the crowd by offering you everything at free of cost. This little gem of software is the best program I have ever downloaded for image viewing and editing. I would highly recommend it to all photographers especially, give it a try and have fun playing around!

As we all know that “content is the king” but their are few other things that can boost the presentations of your blog pots. About 80-90% of internet mass is very fluctuating and scans the internet on the basis of keyword and stay for interesting images only.

Power of Images: If i described in more brief than have an example of comic books where we read the images together with the bubble texts. Have you ever read any comic book in unknown language? May be yes, I think you can go through the whole story of the comics without having the raw knowledge of that language, this is the power of images.

Using relevant and customized images in the blogpost always helps users to understand your points. Their are many ways to choose the images from the websites like flickr , google images and other. Note: You may also use the advance powers of the flickr images search.

Options to search creative and legal images out of the flickr search:

1.Creative Commons licensed Images

2.Search by content type have the options to have creative, innovative ,artistic images. Here you can also get the Screenshots and Screencasts for your blogposts.

3.SafeSearch options

4.Search Photos , Videos or both media types.

Apart from these manual ways their are several plugins to automatically including images in the wordpress editor. Few of the plugins are Flickr Post , WordPress Flickr Manager , WP-Flickr ,Photo of the Day – flickr widget ,Scriblio flickr Importer ,Get Flickr Thumbnails ,Simple Flickr Photos ,Flickr Feed Gallery and many more.

Note : Wait for my upcoming posts on designing customized images for the blog posts. Few pots like “Future Trends of Mobile Networking” have light customization over flickr images. You need to note that by giving proper reference of the image source, you are enhancing your own credibility in front of your users. Few other pots like 5 benefits of using Social bookmarking are the beautiful examples of designing fully customized images out of your own creativity. So be patience and soon i’ll cover up those easy posts of designing.

There are plenty of online image editors out there, but it can be tough to find the right one. If you’re looking for a few filters, a bit of layer support, and a decent range of tools, Pixlr might be the one you want.While it’s not the most full-featured image editor you’ll ever use, Pixlr makes it fairly easy to do some sophisticated (and unsophisticated) things with images online.You’ll be familiar with its tools from using desktop apps like Photoshop and The Gimp, but it’s rare to see so many advances options in a web app.The Flash-based web app has an impressive set of tools, from a text engine that can use nearly any font available on your computer to layers and filters for masking and effects, respectively.Incredibly, there’s even a multilevel undo! You can import images from your machine or via URL, or paint something up yourself, and either way save it to your desktop. It’s fun to play around with, though quickly frustrating if you’re used to more powerful tools.

Some of the Pixlr perks that surprised me: opacity sliders! Layers and transparency! The collection of filters includes halftones, scanlines and pixelation. Common (but useful) features like hue/saturation, resizing, and brightness/contrast are also intact. Next time you find yourself on a computer without Photoshop, you might also find you don’t need it.The application supports layers, filters and most basic editting tools and when you are ready you can save the image to your desktop as a JPG or PNG.