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Photo Editing

Three Photo Editing Tools

by Dr. Bruce Ellis February 6, 2023

written by Dr. Bruce Ellis

Isn’t it great when you take lots of photos of your kids or family and then take time to sit back and scroll through them, reflecting on the fun (and possibly chaos) that ensued? Unfortunately, sometimes when we do get a chance to scroll through the photos we realize there are some things we wish we could change. If you have found yourself in this situation at least once, then you’ll want to check out these three photo editing tools. I’m only going to share a brief bit about each, but these tools offer even more features for you to explore.

Cleanup.Pictures

Cleanup.Pictures is an online artificial intelligence (AI) photo editing tool that allows you to remove items from a photo. This technique is called inpainting. Have a photo where someone photo bombed you? Or did the crazy uncle want to be in the picture (be sure to put him on the end to make it easier to remove)? Or is there something distracting in the background? Use this tool to remove it from the photo.

The AI will inspect the photo and try to recreate what is behind the item you removed. This is a freemium site, so if you want to download your photos in HD, you will need to go with the Pro plan ($3/month) or ClipDrop Pro plan ($5/month). You can find out more about those plans on the pricing page. I’ve found that the free plan, which scales your photos down to 720p is more than sufficient for my tasks.

Here are the steps to follow:

Go to Cleanup.Pictures.
Drag/drop your photo in the target area, or click the target area to upload the photo.
Adjust the size of your brush by moving the slider dot. Move your cursor over the image to see the current size. You want to use the smallest brush size possible for the item, so you don’t wipe out other items in the image.
Click and drag the brush over an item to remove the item. It’s ideal if you can erase the whole item before releasing your mouse.
If any artifact residue remains, you can touch it up. Sometimes it’s perfect, and other times it needs a little tweaking.
To see the before/after of your image, click on the eyeball just to the left of the green Download button (top right).
When satisfied, click the Download button. It will append the name of the file by adding “_cleanup” so your original file is untouched.

before and after edit of sample image from cleanup.pictures. chair, papers on wall, and lamp are removed

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe has included some cool features in Photoshop that make use of Sensei, its suite of AI and machine learning technologies. I’ll be referencing the neural filters in Photoshop – specifically the Landscape Mixer, but I encourage you to explore the other creative filters within the neural filter category. If you really want to apply more filters than it allows, you may need to repeat the steps below two or more times.

Here are the steps to follow:

Open your photo in Adobe Photoshop 2022
Click on FILTER –> Neural Filter
Scroll down the All Filters list and turn on Landscape Mixer. If you have not used this yet, it may need to download on your computer before you can use it.
Now select the preset slider scales on the right-hand side and adjust to the desired strength. The choices include: day, night, sunset spring, summer, fall, and winter. Below you can see the original image and then what it looks like when I set the Autumn to 50% or the Winter to 90%.
Adjust the slider to get the desired strength applied. Note that this is most like rendering it on your computer so I suggest you don’t have other software running unless you have a good bit of RAM.
If you do not want the AI to adjust your subject, then tick the Preserve Subject box. Whether you use this feature will depend on the colors that are in your subject.
When you are satisfied with the filter, apply it by choosing the desired output (new layer, current layer, new layer masked smart filter, or new document). I prefer the New Layer option.
Click OK to apply the filter and voila!

Canva

If you aren’t on the Canva bus yet, are you even online? Seriously though. Canva offers great features without the steep learning curve that comes with Photoshop. No, Canva isn’t an equal competitor to Photoshop, but they each are great design tools for their own target audiences and projects. The feature I’d like to share in Canva is the background remover. Yes, you can use a variety of websites that offer just that feature, but Canva is more than just a photo editing tool. It makes it easy to remove the background and then pull from a huge repository of photos to use as the new background. For the sample below I’m using a photo from a couple of years ago when I visited a friend in Houston. The setting was beautiful but the photo didn’t really capture it. Oh, and, no judging the main subject of the photo. ha! Here are the steps.

Open Canva and begin a new project.
Click on the Upload button (far left menu), and upload the photo that needs the background removed.
Drag the uploaded photo to the stage area.
Click on the photo if it not already selected (you’ll know it is selected if it has a purple border around it.). The resize handles on the corners of the photos and the crop handles are in the center of each edge of the photo.
Click on Edit Image, above and to the right of the stage area.
Click the BG Remover icon. It will analyze your selected image and remove the background.
You can tweak its work by using the Erase and Restore tools.
When done, click on the Apply button.
To put a new background behind you, click on the Photos icon (far right menu panel) and search for an image.
Place the new background image behind you by clicking CTRL+[ or set the photo as the background by clicking on the More icon and selecting Set Image as Background.
When done, click the Share button (top right) and select the share option of your choice. If you choose to download, you may select what file type in which you’d like to download the image (I usually choose PNG).
Click the Download button and save to your device.

So, which photo editing tool do you prefer? And, how will you (or your students) use these tools to enhance photos? Drop us a comment below, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to share another photo editing tool to add to the list!

February 6, 2023 0 comment

Chromebooks Web 2.0 Tool Windows

PhotoAid: Free Easy Photo Enhancing Tools

by Miguel Guhlin July 19, 2022

written by Miguel Guhlin

Fantastic image editing tools abound online. Let me introduce you to a new one, PhotoAid. It offers a stunning amount of solutions on one website through a collection of free, online photo editing tools–14 different tools to be exact. Let’s take a look at my top five PhotoAid tools. And, given the positive response this blog entry has received, you can find contributions from Twitter fans included after Tool #4. Check them out!

The main product of PhotoAiD is the all-in-one passport photo editor, which, thanks to Artificial Intelligence, will transform a simple selfie into a professional passport-style photo. The software we developed is composed of numerous small apps like our remove-shadows-from-photo app. We have figured out the smaller tools may be beneficial to plenty of people on their own, hence in order to give back to the society, we made this tool completely free of charge.

Tool #1: Background Remover

There are a lot of background remover tools, but often the tool host limits them in some way. Not the case with PhotoAid. There are limits, of course, but they are:

Max upload size: 30MB, 10000px x 10000px
Supported formats JPEG, WEBP, PNG

Compared with Remove.bg, which offers 573 x 435 downloads, that’s a high-quality improvement. You can see the difference between the two images below:

A quick comparison between the two with Irfanview:

Pretty nifty, huh? Now Remove.bg does offer an additional feature that still makes it a winner if you need it. That is, after removing the background, you can add a new one. The new background can be one of the ten plus scenes or you upload one of your own. That aside, if you want to remove the background and get an image with more pixels, then PhotoAid’s is the tool to use.

Tool #2: Free Round Cropping Tool

Find yourself dropping images into Powerpoint or Google Slides for cropping? Stop. Instead of using those juggernaut tools for cropping an image to a circle, use this one from PhotoAid. It’s quick and gives you a nice result, as you can see below:

Once you have adjusted the cropping tool (the blue circle), download your image. It will look something like this (although not as dashing as my Bitmoji, of course):

TIP: Remember if you need to crop images into other shapes, you can also use IMGonline.

Tool #3: Free Photo Blurring Tool

Need to blur a portion or all of your photo? There are several tools you can use. For example, one of my favorite photo blurring tools is Irfanview. It’s a no-cost, Windows-only program (look at the shareware Graphic Converter for a Mac alternative) that offers a host of features. One of those features is the ability to blur images. The reason I like it is that I can apply a wide variety of effects via a simple interface to a photo selection. That is, blur the face of one person in a group rather than the whole group.

For a browser-based tool, you can try LunaPic would let you. A tool like LunaPic would let you be more selective about which portion of the image you might want to blur, like Irfanview.

If you need to blur an entire photo, then PhotoAid’s Free Photo Blurring Tool works quite well.

It’s a question of how selective you want to be. A general-purpose blurring tool can be helpful to have.

Tool #4: Shadow Remover

Now this is a tool I haven’t seen much. It allows you to lighten an image by removing shadows. Here’s a picture of me in my new Fiesta hat:

What if I want to remove the shadow cast by the brim of the hat? Here’s the resulting image; you decide as to the quality:

This might work great for removing circles under a person’s eyes, but I’m not sure about shadows cast by a hat brim. Here’s another example. The picture on the left is the original, and the one on the right is enhanced.

Hold On, I Want To Share Some Other Tools, too!

Thanks to feedback from the Twitterverse, I’m adding a few more tools other readers want to see included. Special thanks to TCEA Member John Bimmerle for sharing IMGCandy. If you haven’t seen it yet, it offers a ton of features as well, similar to PhotoAid. Give it a looksee!

Tool #5: Image Enlarger

Have a thumbnail image that you wish were…well…larger? You can do that with the image enlarger tool. The idea is that you can “upscale your pictures without losing quality.”

For this test, I took a small image and ran it through the enlarger.

Here’s the original thumbnail image:

Here’s the enlarged image:

The pixel resolution doubled. What do you think of the quality of the image?

Additional PhotoAid Tools

I’ve shared a few of my most often used tools through PhotoAid’s site. But there are nine more to try. Find them all online here. The ones I didn’t mention but that you may find useful include:

Photo Darkening Tool
Photo Inverter
Photo Cropper
Color Eyedropper Tool
Black and White Photo Editor
Photo Flipper
Photo Brightener
Colorize Photo Tool
Photo Rotator

Additional Articles on Photo Editing

If you’re a first time visitor, you may be wondering what other TCEA blog entries address photo editing and enhancing. Here is a short list you can explore later.

Become a PhotoDroid: Image Editing on Android
iPhoneography: Image Editing on the Go (with any device)
[Converting PDFs/Images to Digital Worksheets](CONVERTING PDFS/IMAGES TO DIGITAL WORKSHEETS)
Vector Images: Make Magic with Two Free Tools
Powerful Photo Editing for All Devices
Fix Your Grumpy sELF: How to Change Your Bitmoji Expressions
How to Edit Emoji and Icon Colors using Google
Shape Word Clouds Made Easy
Five Fantastic Browser-Based Digital Tools

Give them a try. There’s bound to be some awesomeness you can use with your existing images.

Feature Image Source

Screenshot by author.

July 19, 2022 0 comment

Android

Become a PhotoDroid: Image Editing on Android

by Miguel Guhlin February 3, 2018

written by Miguel Guhlin

“Combinations of brightness and contrast settings can have very dramatic impact to your image, adding extra ‘punch’ or softening the visual impact,” says John Huegel in his piece, Image Editing Skills & Tools for Photographers. A Catholic school student for most of my life, I developed bad habits when it came to color matching. Dressing in simple white, blues, and/or black during your formative years may do that to you. Who would have thought uniforms might inhibit photo editing skills? Photos taken with my camera are more documentary in nature, resembling pictures of alleged UFOs in the sky. In a word, a “mess.” Manipulating photos today, though, has grown a lot easier. Let’s explore some photo editing tools on the Android platform by becoming PhotoDroids.

Impact of the PhotoDroid

“In June 2017, 53.3 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers were using a Google Android device. Apple was the second most popular mobile OS with a market share of 44.9 percent,” reports Statista via their interactive graph. While some may argue that photo editing is best done on a Windows or Mac device or Chromebook, many of us snap pictures on the go. For at least fifty-three percent of us, that is an Android smartphone (iOS is second most popular with 44.9%).

Some of my favorite photo backup and editing tools appear below. Give them a try, won’t you?

A Few of My Favorite Tools

Google Photos remains one of the top photo apps, and not just because it backs up all your photos from your smartphone to the Google cloud. Google Photos automatically turns your photos into animated slideshows. What’s more, Photos makes it easy for friends to contribute their own pics to a shared album and more. This can be a life saver for journalism students curating images in an online space. Google Photos also incorporates simple editing tools, including crop, light balance, and basic filters. Microsoft’s OneDrive also provides automatic backup of images and photo albums. Try them both out and decide which works best for you.

photodroid

In the picture shown above, you can see a sample of the amazing holiday cookies made for TCEA staff each year by Peggy Reimers. This picture can have a baker’s dozen of special effects applied to them from within Google Photos.

CameraMX serves as a nice replacement to the built-in camera app you have on your Android phone. It allows you to apply a wide variety of effects, some of which are free. Other effects will cost, but just $1.99 per collection. Effect collections include Summer Shore, Iconic Line, Famous Movie Looks, and Fun Mirrors. Each collection provides a host of effects that can enhance your photo. You need not purchase effects, though, to use many of the benefits of CameraMX. Those benefits includes geometric grain, geometric, multi-color vignette, and scratches overlays. A wide array of frames are also available.

For example, in the snapshot below (captured from a television news broadcast with CameraMX), you can see several effects with frame applied. In a short time, you and your students can produce beautiful images for websites and presentations.

Source: Snapshot of television screen, SA Live show on KSAT12 broadcast on 01/6/18 featuring West Kings Highways‘ singer, Johnny Carrera

Pictures can be shared to a variety of online spaces or remixed into another app for app-smashing purposes.

Android Screenshot Tip: Did you know you can configure your Android device to take a screenshot of whatever app you are in? Some of the screenshots of my Android device involved running three fingers simultaneously down the phone’s screen. This takes a snapshot that is autosaved to your Google Photos, making it easy to capture and save screenshots of your device. To configure, go to Settings->Additional Settings->Screenshot to enable “slide three fingers to take a screenshot.“

PicsArt Photo Studio opening screen on Android Smartphone

PicsArt Photo Studio: Collage Maker and Pic Editor offers several features, including (per their description) “tools, effects, collage maker, camera, free clip art library, millions of user-created stickers, and our drawing tools.” This is one of the most fun apps you can start with. PicsArt Photo Studio delivers with a wealth of effects in a simple interface.

photodroid

But wait, there’s more! With stickers, call-outs, and more, there’s nothing cheesy you can’t do with a picture. In this image below, you can see a call-out (“Love is…”) and a heart sticker that’s been superimposed. What’s neat is you can use the built-in eraser in PicsArt to remove the contents of the heart, revealing your photo beneath the outline of the sticker. That’s simply incredible. You can also add other elements (like alien hands) to the animation.

photodroid

The makers of PicsArt Studio have also created Animator. It allows you to create animated GIFs, blending pictures you may have taken with animations. Per their website, PicsArt Animator includes…”duplicate frames, layers, fully equipped drawing tools, animated stickers, Emoji Me features, and much more!” Here’s a quick animation I made with a picture of the countryside viewable from a car ride. I added the sun and airplane.

photodroid

More Photo Magic Here

photodroid There are many more photo editors you can take advantage of on the Android platform. Two of my final favorites include PhotoLayers and GifGuru. Here’s a quick overview of these, along with a few others:

PhotoLayers: Interested in taking pictures with green screen on Android? You can use PhotoLayers to take any green screen picture and then replace the background. You can learn more about green screen by visiting my website on the topic, as well as read more blog entries here at TCEA TechNotes. Blog entries include the following:
GifGuru: Recently, I explored creating digital image slideshows with animated GIFs. While I had identified tools for iOS and your computer, I missed GifGuru on Android. It enables you to convert a video to a sequence of images or organize images you’ve taken with your smartphone. This sequence of images is placed into an animated GIF you can share in a variety of ways, via Twitter, websites, or share them on Giphy.
Giphy offers a FREE app available for both Android and/or iOS, so if 100% free animated GIFs are desirable, go with Giphy. Imagine your students creating animated GIFs about their content knowledge or a visual tutorial and then sharing it on Giphy’s website (you may need to review content before sharing it).
Quote Editor: This is one of the many tools you can use to combine images with quotes. It enjoys multiple fonts, built-in quotes (in case you find yourself without words), and an easy interface. Although no Typorama, you can have a lot of fun. Less is more, after all. Endless choices can paralyze students. You can see the example shown right.

Were you looking for a selfie app? Here are two you will want to explore, Microsoft Selfie and Cymera. These are two apps you will want to check out. While I’ve mentioned Microsoft Selfie before in my iPhoneography blog entry, I hope you will check out Cymera. It comes with “thousands of filters effects, collage, frames, selfie stickers and the best features for your photodroid face and body.” That’s no joke. You will want to view all the free effects and options Cymera comes with. While Microsoft Selfie limits the choices (much easier), Cymera works hard to put effects at your fingertips, such as Face Pop (example shown right), Meme, Text and stickers.

Say “Cheese!”

Helping students explore image editing and effects in an academic setting may seem like too much fun. However, the conversations about file types (e.g. JPG, PNG, GIF, animated GIF), how to share online, and how to insert images into documents meant for web or print are priceless. While students take a hit or miss approach to graphic image manipulation, direct instruction with an academic purpose can help you address those Technology Applications TEKS. These approaches range from K-3 with appropriate use of digital images to high school.

February 3, 2018 0 comment