Whether you’re an aspiring graphic designer or not, there are times when you need to manipulate or edit images according to your needs. You might be blogger looking to improve the images in your site or simply an avid collector of memories. At the end of the day, most of us are after the same thing – high quality images.

Good thing Vivien of Inspiration Bit shared about Picnik, a FREE online image editor which allows you to manipulate photos to fit your needs. To make this tool more useful, you can install it as a Firefox or Internet Explorer add-on so you can just press right click on any image and you will have an option to pull that image to Picnik site for quick editing.

No need to buy expensive software like Adobe Photoshop for basic editing or download free graphic software and spend time to learn it. You just need an Internet connection and a Web browser.

It can be a stand alone application as well for non-heavy users. To make our lives a lot easier, it enables us to edit directly from popular sites like Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, and Facebook.

Picnik users can rotate, resize, sharpen, remove red eyes, and crop images as part of its editing functions. Looking at the sample image above, you can add text, shapes, frames, touch-up, and effects like sepia, black & white, matte, and many others as well.

Standard features are free of charge. If you love this simple tool and happen to be a heavy user, you can upgrade to premium account for only $25 per year or around $2 per month.

Via Graphic Design Blog

We already highlighted the difference between vector graphics and raster graphics. Just to recap, vector graphics are ideal for those perfectionist designers who want high quality images and razor sharp precision. More importantly, it gives you the flexibility to resize images easily without sacrificing image quality.

However, the problem is you need to have illustration programs like Adobe Illustrator or Corel. Good thing there is VectorMagic, an online tool that converts bitmap images to vectors for FREE. This simple to use tool is the outcome of Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research project by James Diebel and Jacob Norda.

You just need a decent browser like Mozilla Firefox, a Flash Player, and an image you want to vectorize. Just upload the image and this online tool will handle the rest. You can now resize the image without any pixelation whatsoever.

Source image can be in JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF format and you can download it in formats PS, SVG, PNG. See how this free service fares with Adobe Live Trace and Corel PowerTRACE.

Whether you’re using this for your personal or professional images, one thing is sure – it’s time to say goodbye to pixelated images.

Via freewaregenius

The new Mercury theme is the first of a series of WordPress themes that we’ll be releasing here - one every two weeks, including the occasional free premium theme. I’m biased, but I think Mercury is better than a lot of free WP themes. Here are some of the features.

1. A 3-column design.
   1. Left-side navigation bar.
   2. Content section
   3. A “recent posts” section on the right.
2. Space for below the main header for customizing with an image and your welcome text.
3. Bold blue-green color mix.
4. Bold, very visible RSS feed subscription button.
5. Calendar, which could be replaced with ads if you prefer.
6. Space for a “Featured” link and snapshot.
7. Landscape mode showing MyBlogLog users that have recently visited.
8. Space for two IAB standard 125×125 pixel sponsor ads.

Of course, you can customize the theme as you see fit. Just leave in the “design credit” link for LogoDesignWorks. Check out the Mercury theme demo page.

By Design links to various websites, blogs and resources related to blogging, design, analytics, and infographics. This round covers a domain name brainstormer, video search engine, video display widget, AJAX libraries, and a color tool.

1. Bust a (domain) name.
   

   Still considering a domain name for your website or blog? Not all the good ones are taken, despite what it might seem like. If you’re looking for the availability of the domains using a combination of words, try Bust A Name [via Randa Clay]. Just type in a few words in the “word combiner” and it’ll give you back a list of available domains using combinations of two words from your list. If a domain is available, you’ll get a drop down list that provides links to registrars.

2. Gujam Video Search Engine.
   

   Looking for video content for your website or blog? Gujam searches a number of video sites and returns the results collated for convenience.

3. WeShow video widgets.
   

   WeShow is a video sharing site that also offers a widget for displaying videos on a web page. The blog widget comes in one vertical and four horizontal formats, and each displays a snapshot of multiple videos that react when a mouse cursor hovers over them. You can customize the border color and select multiple content channel categories. Videos for selected channels for the widget appear to all come from YouTube, but I haven’t verified that.

4. MiniAjax.
   

   If you’ve been thinking about adding some Ajaxified dialogs, demo or info windows, draggable content, lightboxes, contact forms and much more, MiniAjax makes it easier. You can easily add a bit of “wow” to your site without having to code from scratch.

   MiniAjax is actually a portal to DHTML and JavaScript code available from several websites. There are snapshots of the use of each piece of code, along with an explanation. As far as I could tell, all of it is free.

5. Name That Color.
   

   Chir.ag offers a neat little color tool that can be used to learn color names. Drag the circle in the colorwheel or in the embedded color square, and the rectangular area to the right fills in with the selected color. Alternately, you can use the drop-down list of over 1500 colors. In addition to the RGB and Hex color values, the closest color name is show. There’s also a downloadable JavaScript library that you can use to embed the tool into your site.

By Design links to a variety of articles found online, with topics relating to design, blogging, information interfaces, analysis and more. This round summarizes articles about web surfing, color theory, and data charting.

1. Web surfing.
   

   Wisdump shows you how to surf like Tom Cruise. Surf the web that is. Read the article and you’ll understand the connection between the interesting web interfaces profiled there and the science fiction movie Minority Report, based on the Philip K. Dick short story. [For another wild information interface, watch Paycheck, another movie based on a PKD story, starring Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman.]

2. Home Page: Full Post or Excerpts?
   

   The more websites you surf, the more likely you are to prefer excerpts on each home page. Or will you? I personally don’t. I like full-text on home pages and in RSS feeds. It’s a necessity for me because of the amount of content I have to browse regularly. But some people prefer it.

   An alternative is to have full-text on the home page and excerpts on archive pages (page 2, page 3, etc.). If that’s something you like, Daniel and Daily Blog Tips has a free Homepage Excerpts plugin for WordPress blogs. Previously, David at Xfep  did the same thing manually and provided some WP PHP code.

3. Color harmonies and matching.
   

   EasyRGB offers a set of tools for those of  you that work with color:

   1. Color matching.
   2. Color harmonies.
   3. Color calculator.
   4. Monitor calibration.
   5. Tint searching.

   In addition to these web-based tools, they offer EasyRGB-PC, which runs on Windows computers.

4. Browser-safe colors.
   

   Website Tips provides an easy-reference grid of browser-safe colors, organized by hue. These are the colors that are supposedly consistent on any computer monitor, provided they’re calibrated. Also see Design Vitality, who offer the meanings of basic colors, in terms of moods set.

5. Charting tools.
   

   Need to create charts from data on the fly? PHP/SWF Charts [via WebAppers] is a tool for PHP scripts that generates Flash charts and graphs. There’s also an XML/SWF version that functions the same way with other scripting languages including ASP, Perl and more. Both have a full complement of standard charting and graphing features - including lines, columns, pie, candlestick, and more - so they can be used for a variety of data.