Suggestions on ez photo edit?

I want to edit a bunch of my jpegs to clear up some space.
Most of them were shot too wide or include unrelated stuff/people.
I'm on the novice level with this and can crop the pictures, but I'm having a terrible time finding something that will let me outline and cut out specific parts of the picture.
What I mean is, I can't find something that is on my level of 'noviceness'.
I tried outlining and cutting (with the mouse and a mouse pen) with limited success but it's hard to do without a rock steady hand. I also tried a couple of store bought programs but they required more than I could give...lots of settings and adjustments, etc.
Is there anything out there that will do the cut out thing simply? Something free would be icing on the cake.
Thanks in advance -

 

If you've already bought several photo editing programs I'd look for a tool in one of them that would allow you to do what you wish to. Just because the programs have lots of features doesn't mean you have to get lost in trying to figure out all of them -- just look for the right tool that will allow you to do what you want to do. Typically good photo editing software has a tool that will allow you to set a bunch of points with mouse clicks to outline something you wish to "cut out" of a photo and save as a separate smaller file or to outline an irregular shape that you wish to crop to. Doing it this way is much easier than trying to draw an entire line around it freehand with a pen type device and usually works quite well. If the object you wish to outline has an irregular complicated boundary you can usually magnify the image enough with the software so that you can even see individual pixels to click on and set the crop points with the mouse clicks very precisely.

You can probably find the info you need in the help drop down menu of your photo editing programs by looking through the index or table of contents. It may take you a few minutes of hunting around but once you find it and experiment a bit I suspect you'll find it's not so difficult. Just make sure you make a copy of one of your jpegs to experiment on until you get the hang of it.

Sorry I couldn't be more specific but I'll bet if you take a few minutes to look through the Help section of one of the programs you already have you can find what you need and just ignore the other stuff. And some photo editing software has built in video tutorials. If your software does, look through the table of contents for the tutorials to spot the chapter that describes how to crop/outline irregular or odd shapes and just view that part of the tutorial.

There's certainly freeware available to do simple photo editing and maybe even some pretty sophisticated stuff for free. Try doing a Google or altavista search for "free photo editing software" or something like that and see what you can find. And check out the downloads here at MajorGeeks also to see if they have something that will do.

Good luck!

 

Hey, thanks for the tips. I didn't think of zooming in to get into the nooks and crannies. It'll take a while, but I've got time.
(The worst thing about digital cameras is the freedom to take all the pictures you want... then having to deal with them. Of course they're ALL keepers! When I had to pay for developing, I was much more conservative.)
I'll fire up the search engines again & post if I find something free and easy.

 

Several other ideas have occured to me that you might find useful.

1) Rather than editing your pictures to conserve hard drive storage space you could burn them to CD's and get them off your hard drive entirely without having to hassle with editing them (assuming you have a CD burner). You can put a lot of pictures on one CD-R. It will take a bit longer to load them from CD when you wish to view them but not all that much longer. If you do decide to burn them to CD's it would be a good idea to burn two copies of each CD and put one away for safekeeping against the day your dog decides that gleaming round thing is just the new toy he needs to chew on or a young child decides to see if he can flush it down the toilet etc etc.

2) If you don't have a CD burner you should check in your photo editing software for a photo/image file conversion utility. This will allow you to convert your jpg files to other image formats that may result in smaller file sizes. And the jpg standard allows for different compression levels and one of your photo editing packages may allow you to convert your jpg's to a higher compression jpg format that will result in smaller file sizes (at some loss of picture quality if you push the compression too far -- but you can experiment with it until you find a happy medium). The main thing to be careful of with this method is to be sure to specify a different file name for the new higher compressed file before you actually execute the convert/compress routine. You'll be compressing a jpg image to a higher level of compression but the file extension will still be the same -- .jpg -- so if you use the same file name you'll overwrite the old file and if the quality of the more compressed image is unsatisfactory you won't be able to go back to the original image if it's overwritten because you didn't change the file name. Or create a special folder and first copy (not move) the jpg images you want to work with into that folder and you won't have to change the file names -- just try compressing them more in the jpg format and let them overwrite and if you need to go back to the original image you'll only have overwritten the copy. On the other hand if the quality of the smaller, more highly compressed jpg file is acceptable you can replace the older larger file with the newer smaller one.

I have PowerDesk Pro, which is primarily a file management utility, but it also includes a photo tool that allows me to easily convert a picture file into a variety of formats as I've described above, including increasing compression of jpg images to reduce the file sizes and it's quite easy to use and works well.

Maybe one of these suggestions will be easier than trying to edit/crop your pictures?

 

wetrat,

Try IrfanView, http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4253

Steve

 

Eezak - I'm doing some "to CD" stuff, but the loading part seems to take too long. Too long is relative...it's not hard drive fast.
- I've tinkered with the compression thing (and made some of the mistakes you noted). I'll continue to work on this.

Matacumbie - I've been using IV for quite a while. I really like it because it's very easy for me to use. Maybe my version needs to be updated, I can't see any option for the outline/cut/paste deal I'm interested in. I'll check on a newer version.

Thanks, Geeks, for the good feedback!!