Have you ever placed an image on your website only to notice later that your site grinds to a halt as the image loads? Have you ever taken what would be a great photo, only to have it spoilt by something in the background?
In these days of websites that businesses can edit themselves, email marketing and social media, having the ability to edit images that you want to use for business purposes is fast becoming a necessity. There are two main reasons why you may want to edit an image:
- Optimise the image for a website or email campaign. With more and more people looking at websites and emails on mobile devices, using only images that are optimised (compressed to reduce the file size) is vital.
- Improve the image. Let’s face it, most of us aren’t going to win any prizes for our camera skills but there are some simple things anyone can do to improve an image and make it more engaging.
There is a myriad of image editing software around that can help you improve your business images and one that I’ve found recently is PicMonkey. As well as being free to use (there is a premium version with no ads and even more options), PicMonkey is online and has some very powerful features. All you need do is import your image and you can do all sorts of cool things such as:
- Resize your image to optimise it for websites and emails
- Crop, rotate and improve exposure, colours and sharpness
- Apply effects
- Fix blemishes, wrinkles and other imperfections
- Add text, shapes, frames, textures and themes
- You can even quickly share your image through social media
Take a look at PicMonkey at www.picmonkey.com. I’m heading there now to remove some of my wrinkles!