ITS Technology Tips

If you have a digital camera then you probably have hundreds of digital photos stored on your computer. You may use software that allows you to organize your photos into albums on your computer or maybe you use an online photo-sharing application such as Flickr or Google’s Picasa. Let’s say you want to take your photo-sharing capabilities even further and create customized slideshows that you can easily distribute online. With Slideroll, you can create video-like slideshows that you can share via email or post to your website or blog. With a free Slideroll account, you can add music to your slideshows and import photos from your Flickr account; plus Slideroll produces slideshows in the Flash video format, which can be played in the most common Web browsers. Here are a few pointers to help get you started with using Slideroll.

Getting Started with Slideroll

In order to access Slideroll’s features, you will need to create a free account. Once you login, you will have the option to upload photos to your gallery or you can click on Slideshow Creator to start creating a slideshow.

In the Slideshow Creator, you can add photos, text slides, and choose music if desired. Once you are finished putting your slideshow together, you will get a link to your slideshow that you can share via email or you may embed a code to display your slideshow on your website. If you create a Slideroll slideshow for a course you can include your link in a PowerPoint presentation or Blackboard course.

Image-editing software can help you alter images that you may have downloaded from the Internet, scanned for your business card or webpage, or taken with your digital camera. This type of software is incredibly helpful to have around. However, the most popular image-editing applications – Adobe Photoshop and its simplified brethren: Photoshop Elements, Corel Paintshop Pro, and Macromedia Fireworks, can be rather costly. Why not save some clams and get some programs that are absolutely free?

Paint.NET is an image and photo manipulation software that runs on Windows. It was developed at Washington State University by computer science students, and was intended to be a juiced-up freeware replacement for the MS Paint software that comes standard with all Windows operating systems. Paint.NET has many powerful features such as special effects, layers, unlimited undo, masking, color, tone and lighting adjustments. Whew!

PhotoPlus 6 is free software that is chock full of features we’re sure everyone will use: image maps, image slicing, smart shapes, export optimizing. Uh, what? But really, it does have great things like red-eye removal tool, all sorts of photo enhancement tools so you can touch up your pictures, and did we say that this is free? Sorry Mac users – PhotoPlus 6 is for Windows only.

GIMP for Windows
Gimp for Mac
GIMP (which means “GNU image manipulation program”) is a popular open-source image editor developed by volunteers. It was created to be an open-source replacement for Adobe Photoshop. We recommend this software for people who are more comfortable with computers – it’s a bit more confusing to install and navigate than PhotoPlus and Paint.NET. It’s also available (and originally created) for Linux users.

GimpShop is a version of GIMP that is supposed to be friendlier to Adobe Photoshop users. GIMPshop users have found the interface of GimpShop to be easier to navigate than GIMP. In many instances, Photoshop tutorials can be followed in GIMPshop with no changes or with little modification.