Hi all,

I have a Macbook and desperately need to invest in a photo editing program. I can't resize my photos and it's driving me nuts! I used to use free Picassa on my PC and loved it, but sadly they don't make it for Mac. I also recently tried a free trail version of Adobe Photo Shop but found it rather complicated. I'm stumped.

Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I use Photoshop Elements. I have an older version. The newest version (version 6) came out a couple of months ago and is made for intel Macs so it should run pretty fast. Make sure you get the Mac version.

Whoops, just re-read your post (sorry early in the morning for me). Did you try Photoshop Elements or the real Photoshop? I bought one of the Photoshop Element books to help me learn. I learned the basic editing skills pretty quickly and slowly learned some of the more advanced skills as well. It has so much more to offer than the basic Picassa once you do learn the program.

There's kind of a workaround to resizing your photos in iPhoto, but you don't get a lot of choice. If you select a picture and choose "Email" you will get three size options for the picture to be emailed. Then your email program will open with a resized copy of the photo attached to a message, and you can save it to the desktop from there.

Another free option is to go to the H-P web site and download the program HP Image Edit. I don't know exactly where to find it, but it may be somewhere with printer software. It's supposed to be used with Hewlett Packard printers, but you can actually use it to resize and edit any pictures. It's quite simple to use and does a decent job, although certainly much less full-featured than Photoshop, even the Elements version.

- Roz

Roz, those are fabulous tips! I've been trying to figure out how to resize in iPhoto and going mad. I also happen to own an HP printer. Thank you! I'll give give both options a try and see what happens.

Girasoli, I'm considering Adobe elements but I'm not in love with it. I like SIMPLE. That said, I might break down and buy the older version that you have (4.0, right?). It's about half the price.

I have the "OLD" version - 2.0. I haven't really needed to upgrade since it works fine for me but since you have an computer with intel, I would recommend the newest intel compatible version that just recently came out since this version was made to run on intel. The older versions run slowly on intel computers. Once I finally get a new computer, I plan to upgrade.

In iPhoto '08, you can use export in the File ... menu to resize your photos. In the window, select your file type. Then, where it says size select custom from the pull down menu if you want to be exact and set a maximum height or width. There are also some preset options for size. In iPhoto '05, export used to be under the Share ... menu at the bottom and has all of the same flexibility of resizing settings as future versions.

While I miss more of the graphic arts opportunities from Photoshop, I have been using iPhoto for the last two years after a previous 8 of managing my photography with Photoshop. If all you want to do is simple corrections and organize your photos, iPhoto lies between Picasa and Photoshop on the ease of use and features. I have also been very happy with the '08 version and its feature set over previous versions. Not to mention iLife is significantly cheaper than Photoshop CS.

Have fun photo editing!

Teachick - does your Macbook have Graphic Converter as free? Mac used to include this with the Powerbooks and iMacs. You can resize, change virtually everything and GC matches many of Photoshop's.

Check your apps folder to see if it is there before you spend more money!

PJD

It looks like Apple still offers Graphic Converter as a shareware that you can download, here.

I don't think they pre-install it anymore.

Alana and PJD, thanks for the info. I've just downloaded Graphic converter and will now try and make sense of it.

Alana, I'll also check out my iPhoto more closely and see if I can use it for resizing. I bought my laptop just after the New Year so I would hope I have the most updated version of iPhoto. I really have no desire to spend the money on Photoshop Elements...