Picturesque by Acqualia: Web Graphics Made Easy

I love Picturesque (by Zac and Nik at Acqualia Software).

If you like tweaking your own website (and have a Mac), this is an incredibly useful piece of software, and a snap to use.

The most recent update to Picturesque includes a cropping facility.

You can use Picturesque to:

• Beautify an image (perhaps one you downloaded from iStockPhoto) - easily add a shadow, a reflection, a border, add 3D perspective or a tilt.
• Crop the image.
• Save the image to the exact dimensions you require for your website, and reduce the quality (to reduce file size).
• Do all of the above for a batch of images, applying your favourite style.

Picturesque won the 2007 Apple Design Award for the Best Mac OS X Student Product, and this upgrade takes what was already an easy to use product and makes it even better. That is unusual.

Here is what I recommend for web graphics if you have a Mac:

• Use Keynote to put together graphics with multiple layers (e.g. gradients, images and text)
• Use Picturesque to crop and size your Keynote exports, or to process images so they are the right size for your website.

Here are some push buttons I prepared in Keynote - they are simple rectangles with a gradient fill and text overlaid. The Keynote page was exported, and I used Picturesque to crop them to size.

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