Category: category_3209

  • 13 Free Tools to Optimize and Compress PNG to Reduce Image Size

    There are many types of different image formats and some of those most commonly found on the Internet are JPEG, GIF, BMP, TIFF and PNG. Each image format has its own purpose such as GIF is used for animated images, JPEG for high quality photos which automatically gets degraded after each save or even a resize, while our favorite PNG is best used on small and transparent pictures. Another huge advantage in PNG files is they’re lossless meaning you can compress PNG’s without losing quality.

    You can easily find many tools on the Internet to compress PNG files but most, if not all of them produce different file sizes due to the algorithm unless they are using the same library/technology. Reducing the image file size to the maximum helps to save bandwidth cost, time to download and even achieving a higher Google PageSpeed score because “optimize images” is one of the priorities.

    In this article we’ve put 13 free PNG compressor tools (online, command line, desktop) to the test to find the one that produces the smallest file size.
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  • 7 Programs to Correct or Fix Blurred and Out of Focus Photos

    There’s no doubt that to many people, the photos they take throughout their life are totally priceless and not something which you can put a value on. But this can also cause a great deal of heartache because in today’s digital world it’s quite easy to lose your photos because your digital camera or smartphone goes wrong and has to be replaced or factory reset, memory cards are also prone to corruption so you might have to run photo recovery tools to try and get them back.

    Losing your photos is one thing, taking the photo and later finding out it’s blurry or out of focus is quite another and very frustrating. Many things can cause this such as movement or shaking of the camera during the shot or simply setting the wrong focus and the camera thinks the objects in the shot are closer or further away than they should be. Most people would immediately delete these types of photos because they think the images are useless and cannot be fixed.

    photo with motion blur

    Thankfully that need not be the case and there are some tools around that claim to be able to refocus your blurred photos and bring them back to something like what the original would look like. Here we look at 7 free and paid image deblurring tools that may just save your treasured photos. The software was tested on Windows 7 but should also work on 8/8.1/Vista and possibly XP.
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  • 5 Ways to Split or Break GIF Animation Into Individual Frames

    GIF is the standard file format to use when it comes to animated images although there are newer alternatives such as MNG and APNG. Basically an animation is created by playing a sequence of frames very quickly to get the desired result. If you would like to extract a particular frame from an animated movie, it is actually quite easy without the use of a third party tool by pausing the media player, pressing the Print Screen button on your keyboard and pasting it to Paint or Microsoft Word.

    Trying to do that on an animated GIF image can be challenging because you can’t pause the animation to take the perfect screenshot. An example is an animation of a text file containing a list of premium accounts that scrolls really fast which is impossible to read. If you’re looking for ways to extract frames from GIF, here we have 5 different methods that can help you to split a GIF animation into individual frames.
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  • 7 Ways to Open PSD Extension Image Files Without Installing Adobe Photoshop

    Many of you will have seen an image file extension around called a .PSD. This is an image file format which is native to the very well known Adobe Photoshop software. While most people tend to use JPEG, BMP or PNG files for their everyday tasks, a PSD file (Photoshop Document) can store a vast amount of extra information about the image such as layers, masks, color profiles, transparency, text, alpha channels etc. PSD files tend to be high quality reference images such as those used in website templates or for desktop publishing. They are also lossless meaning 100% of the image quality is maintained at all times where something like JPEG will subtly lose image quality after every save.

    Since PSD files can be opened and edited by Photoshop, not everyone is willing to spend thousands of dollars on the Adobe Creative Suite just to edit a few PSD files. Even if there is are “free” versions of Adobe CS around on the internet, we would still be reluctant to install the few GB of software just because of the need to open and edit a few PSD files and then uninstall it once done.

    So here are are a few graphics related tools which we found that are able to open PSD files without Photoshop.
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  • How To Enlarge Images Without Losing Quality or Pixelated

    Have you ever tried enlarging an image and then it became blur? I tried many years ago but I never found a way to enlarge it without loosing quality. Some people said that it’s impossible and some even suggested to pay and get them done professionally… Here is an example. I want to enlarge my logo to 200% and here is what it looks like after scaling it to 200%.

    How to scale image without loosing quality

    As you can see, the enlarged image is horrible. I wouldn’t want to use such low quality and blur image on my website. Fortunately, there’s a simple way that I can enlarge images without loosing their quality.
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