I'm looking for a simple, free, editing program that will allow me to crop coin photos to a round format. Cutting off the corners of the photos will allow more detail by eliminating wasted pixels when posting to sites with limited photo bytes. Any tips may be of benefit to many forum users. Thanks. ************ Thanks for the replys. Good to learn that I was wrong about saving file space by cutting corners. Bone Head
There's a program called Microsoft Photo Editor that came free with Microsoft Office through Office 97. I has an easy-to-use circular crop. After that MS gave us the "improved" version which doesn't have circular crop. BUT If you can get a copy of the installation disk for Office 97 (or earlier) you can install Microsoft Photo Editor on you system (assuming you have MS Office.) Go to the MS website for the instructions. I did and I can easily circular crop now. No self-respecting photographer would use Microsoft Photo Editor for editing photos, but it's great for the simpler operations.
im not sure of any free editing programs, but anything that will make a gif file, should be able to handle making it circular. Gif is the only format i know of for non-rectanglular or square based images. Tiff might, but not sure ...
Most high end photo editing programs allow a circular cut or copy. But don't expect a huge reduction in file size. Somebody mentioned a GIF file. As far as I know, all file formats work on the rectangular format - if you want circular, it just puts 0's or whatever in the empty spaces - but the empty areas still take space. I guess the point is that you're still saving a "square" or "rectangular" picture, it's just that it MIGHT take a bit less space.
If you are looking for places to upload your pictures, there are a few sites that are generous with their upload space. For instance, http://www.imageshack.us is a good one as it's virtually unlimited and you can upload up till 1.5 mb. I'm sure your photos aren't THAT large.
I also agree, BUT I believe if the file is compacted it ends up smaller. The long strings of "0"s compacts very well. But when you view the file again it uncompacts and returns to its original size. So compaction is really just for storage and file transfer.
