(And boy am I going to be embarrassed if I find out that Photoshop itself is free.)
I have a simple task that I’d like to perform, I’m only going to do it once, and it’s not important enough that purchasing a tool to do it makes sense. I am into four different sports, and for my Facebook page I’d like to build a single picture, each quadrant being an iconic image of one of those sports. (Say, bowling pins, golf clubs, etc.)
I’m confident that I’ll have no problem collecting four individual images that I want - I just have no idea how to stitch them together.
Ideally, I’m looking for a simple, free tool that I can use to do this. Help!
MS Paint can do it, it’ll be a tedious Cut and Paste job, but you probably have it on your (pc) computer already. If you have a Mac, I’m sure it comes with something free as well.
Everyone I know with iPhones posts stuff like that all the time, so either the phone of the iPhone Facebook app comes with something to do that.
Photoshop was about $600+ dollars last time I checked. GiMP is free, but you probably don’t want to learn how to use it just to do that.
If you want a medium-strength tool, I would recommend PhotoScape. It can’t do as much as GIMP, but it’s easier to use. I’ve used it for things very similar to what you want to do.
If you have MS Office, just use PowerPoint. Another tool would be LayOut. It’s part of SketchUp which is free. Used to be Google, but I think they sold it.
Adobe offers limited-time trials (normally 30 days) for their software, including Photoshop. Now that they’ve gone to Creative Cloud, you’ll need to download the CC app first, which will then let you install a Photoshop trial.
I’m still at a loss as to why the OP thinks he or she needs PhotoShop (or anything like it) to do what he or she needs to do. You’re not editing the photos, you’re just trying to put them together on one page, right? You could do that with Excel.
I’ve been using paint.net (which, despite the confusing name, is a regular piece of software, not a website) for basic Photoshop-style stuff. Seems to work pretty well. It’s free.
I needed to crop and save the result as a photo so that I could upload the results as a photo to my Facebook page. There was a small amount of editing involved.
In theory, Photoshop CS2 is free for download. As far as I see, Adobe has neither confirmed or denied it. I guess you can quite safely download it from here and take a screenshot of a page (which states it is freeware). In extremy unlikely case troubles arise you can show the screenshot and claim you just believed what was told there. Should work.
As an aside, it annoys me that it’s harder to find (using Google in Chrome browser) than it oughtta be. If you google paint.NET, Chrome takes you directly to www.paint.net, which is the site of a company that manufactures actual paint, rather than showing you the google search results for the term paint.net, which includes as a second hit, getpaint.net (which is where to get the program).
Note that rather than using paint directly, irfanview has a paint dialog addon, so that you can do paint stuff inside irfanview. Irfanview does stuff like cropping, resizing and color adjustments all by itself, and with the paint addon, I find that I can do most things I want to do to images in it. If it gets complex, then I can use GIMP. I just experimented a bit, and found that I can make collages in irfanview:
Open two instances, one of which you are going to create the collage in. Open the first image and expand the canvas in that one. Open the other images in the other irfanview instance, copy them and paste into selection boxes in the first instance, and use cut and paste to move them about. If you want to be precise about the sizing use the “custom crop selection” menu to size your selection boxes.
If you do anything with images, and don’t have irfanview, do yourself a favor and download it:
There’s a free and easy Android app called BeFunky that’s great for collages and general photo editing/manipulation. I’ve tried a bunch of app-type editors and I like this one the most, plus it’s both app-based so you can use it and upload from your phone, and web-based so you can log in from any browser and do the same. The ability to use it from a browser is what sold it for me.
Actually that’s correct according to the instruction given to the browser. Yet another charming effect of dumbing down browser UI by eliminating the search box of old !
Weirdly, all this minimalist crap will mean browsers ( or websites thanks to responsive flat design ) will never be as good as they were around 2012 or so… Never glad confident morning again !