Image Editing - Sledgehammer or Toothpick?

I do a lot of image editing on my Mac, and I’ve spent many happy hours with PhotoShop. However, sometimes using PhotoShop for a little task is like cracking an egg with a sledgehammer - just a bit of overkill.

When I need to do some quick and simple image manipulation, I usually turn instead to the tiny, free editor: ImageWell. It’s lightweight and functional like a widget, but a powerful desktop app. If you ever need to make a small crop here, add a spot of text there, or maybe make an image a circle instead of a square, all without the hoopla of launching a large image package stuffed with features - this is one application you’ll definitely want in your bag of tricks.

ImageWell is produced by Xtralean Software, and to get the basic features you need it’s just a quick and free download. There’s also an upgrade you can buy that will give you a few more features for a mere $14.95 CAD - as of today, that’s about $15.44 USD.

ImageWell has limited tricks, but the the ones it has are useful and it does them quite well. Let’s look at a few of them.

The basic interface to ImageWell opens onto this screen. From here, you can quickly re-size an image by either pixel size or percentage. You can change the quality of the image, too. The “More” button (yes, I skipped Watermark - we’ll come back to that) will let you rotate the images, save or open images, or take screenshots.

By clicking the “Watermark” button, you can choose to add a watermark to your image. This is important because another feature you see here. The “Send” button lets you instantly copy the image you’re working on to anywhere you can access by FTP, SFTP, iDisk, WebDav or even just to a folder. You can click “Locations” to access the controls for locations.

This screen is probably the hairiest part of the application, but if you need to be able to upload things to these places, you’ll probably already have the information needed to fill out these forms. Otherwise, ImageWell is still a handy little app for image editing even if you just want to save the products to your hard drive or upload them a different way. You can simply select the “Folder” location and choose folders you often want to save edited photos to - this will speed up your process rather than having to say File→Save and choose a folder each time you want to save something.

But, the fun doesn’t end there. ImageWell lets you perform some minor edits using the “Edit” button. This will let you crop an image, add basic shapes or text, or move it around. You can rotate it by a few degrees, add a shadow, up the transparency or change the shape it’s cropped in. If you like how it looks and don’t want to bother saving it before using it, just click the well to go back to the “front” screen, then drag and drop it directly from the canvas into the application you’d like to see it in. Nifty!

Once you’re done with that, you can click “Preview” to see exactly what the image will look like when you export it, and then choose to send it to whichever location you designate from the list of locations you’ve entered.

You can read about all of the features in detail here, and you can read about the perks you get with a purchased upgrade on this page. This is one app that you’ll want to add to your image editing palate just for the convenience and simplicity it offers. Once you’ve played around with the slick interface a bit, the $15(ish) upgrade is just the thing you need to go from overblown power editor, to mini editor to juuuust right.