Web Graphics Tools for Mac and Windows
This page lists a number of resources you may find useful for preparing graphics for your web site.
If you have any comments on what works best for you or additional tools we should add, please use the comments section at the bottom of the page.
Web Graphics Tools For Mac
| Picturesque | Mac tool for images. Crop, batch resize (dimensions and quality), add drop shadows, reflections, perspective, rounded corners. Beautiful software. $35 USD |
| ImageWell | Mac tool for cropping, resizing and adding drop shadows/watermarks. Doesn’t do batches, but the cropping is the best. Very lean. $20 USD. |
| Keynote | Mac tool for just about everything you could want for web graphics. Export to TIF and crop with Picturesque or ImageWell. $99 USD (part of iWork). See article on how we use it. |
| Free Ruler | Mac tool for measuring objects in pixels, cms or inches. |
| Quicksilver | For advanced Mac users, once you know how to use Quicksilver it is the fastest way to resize images (singles or batches). You need the Image Manipulation Actions plugin for Quicksilver. Free. |
| Hex Color Picker | Adds a hex color picker to the Mac color palette so you can use Hex colors |
| Colour Selector | Find the hex colour of any object on screen |
Note: you can use the built in OS X screen shot key combination Cmd Shift 4 to capture any image off your screen to a .png file.
Web Graphics Tools For Windows
| PIXresizer | Windows tool for cropping and resizing. Free. |
| BatchImage | Windows tool for batch resizing, adding drop shadows. $60 USD |
| FastStone Image Viewer | Tool for cropping, resizing, adding drop shadows, and more. Free for personal / non profit use. $34.95 USD for commercial use. |
| Colour Selector | Find the hex colour of any object on screen |
| Paint.NET | Windows tool for image editing, cropping, resizing. Highly recommended. Free. |
Browser Based Tools (Mac and Windows)
| Jeffrey’s Exif Viewer | Online tool for viewing EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata for an image. |
| Adobe Photoshop Express | A free cross-platform (Windows and Mac) web-based version of Photoshop. Supports basic image editing features such as cropping, correcting, red eye removal, sharpening, etc. No drop shadow support. |
| Stripe Generator | A free tool for generating backgrounds with subtle (or not so subtle) stripes. Product a small image and repeat it horizontally and vertically in your Background area. |
| Glassy Buttons | A free tool for generating glassy buttons. |
| Free tools to go with Firefox that help you see how CSS rules work (and other things interesting to web developers). | |
| Web 2.0 Buttons | Another free tool for generating buttons for your website. |
Colours
| Named Colours | Use colour names such as MidnightBlue in your Site Design settings. |
| All Colours | Use this chart to find a colour with its full Hex color (e.g. #FFFFFF is white). You can use Hex colours in your Site Design settings as well. |
The 800lb Gorillas
If you can master Photoshop (powerful and expensive yet hard to use) or Gimp (powerful and free yet hard to use) you won’t need any of the utilities above. Maybe. Good luck though. You’ll need it.
Sources of Images
We have shifted this resource its own page: Finding Free Images for your Website