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Being that it's Mac Month and all, I thought I'd get around to writing up a little Mac software gem I've been meaning to review for some time -- [Imagewell][1].
The first thing I did when I started writing for Monkey Bites was go hunting for something that would let me quickly resize and save screen grabs since pretty much every post has at least one screen grab. Sure I could do it with Photoshop, but that seemed something akin to swatting a mosquito with a sledgehammer.
Then I found Imagewell, a lightweight image processing program perfect for simple picture manipulations that don't require the bulk of something like Photoshop. Not only is Imagewell capable of the simple resize tasks I need to do, but it can actually take the screen captures as well and even autoloads them into an editing window.
When you open Imagewell you'll see a small window where you can drag and drop your images (you can even drag them from iPhoto and other image programs). Once you have the image you want to work with, Imagewell makes it easy to crop, resize, compress, watermark, add drop shadows, add a border, add text, add labels and more.
Once you have your image looking the way you want it, Imagewell can save it to .jpg, .png or .tiff formats.
Imagewell also offers a variety of export-to-the-web options including the ability to upload straight to a server using FTP. Once you upload your image Imagewell copies the corresponding url to the clipboard making it easy to paste the link into a blog post.
The export features would be perfect if you have FTP access to your blog, which you probably do since not having FTP access would be vaguely insane. Grumble.
ImageWell isn't going to replace Photoshop, but it’s a great tool for lightweight image editing. Imagewell is free, although for a small fee you can unlock some nice [additional options and features][2].
[1]: http://xtralean.com/IWOverview.html "Imagewell, the Free and Lean Image Editor"
[2]: http://xtralean.com/IWXtras.html "Imagewell paid features"
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