Editing Images in Joomla, or on your PC for the web.

Joomla is not designed to be an image editing tool, although if you use JCE Pro instead of the default editor (TinyMCE) you will get a basic image resizing tool but that's about it.

Preferred Image Settings for use on the Web

Before upload an image on your website it needs to be resized to the actual dimensions that it will appear on the screen, and compressed to a size suitable for the web (< 50KB for small images,

A common mistake is to simply resize the display dimensions of your images in Joomla (eg by grabbing the corner of the image and dragging to make it smaller). This often results in jagged images, and very, very slow page loads.

• Photos should be saved as JPEGs with a compression setting of 60-80%
• Drawings or images with very few colours should be saved as GIFs.
• Photos with transparent areas should be saved as PNGs.

Software

Most web designers use Adobe Creative Suite (around $2500) which includes programs like:

• Illustrator (for logos and other vector graphics),
• Dreamweaver (HTML & CSS web development etc)
• Photoshop (advanced photo editing) and
• Fireworks  (an image editor especially built around the needs of image editing for the web) Fireworks has extra tools for button creation, and export settings ideal for web images, and a more simple interface compared to photoshop. If you wanted to buy 1 tool for advanced image editing for the web, then this would be the one to get. It is around $450.

Free Image Editing Software

GIMP is the best free, open source image editing tool. It is fairly advanced (similar in many ways to photoshop, but more basic) and if you're prepared to read the documentation or watch some training tutorials on YouTube you'll be mastering the essentials very quickly.

Absolute Basics:  Crop Scale Cut Rotate Reduce Export Flip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9up3Je0hyc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWHAbY7mllY

Tutorial Channels...
http://www.youtube.com/user/malgalin
http://www.youtube.com/user/Enselic
http://www.youtube.com/user/GimpKnowHow

You'll find these skills will serve you much better than simply relying on the free image editing software that comes with windows (like "paint") or free software that comes with digital cameras. GIMP can be downloaded here.

Bulk Image Editing

(Bulk Resize, Crop, Compress, Filter JPG, PNG, GIF Images etc)