Digital Tools for Photos and Videos
Try these online and/or Windows digital tools for image and video enhancement. Add or remove backgrounds, pixelize, blur images, and more. They are all simple to use and will make your work look amazing!
Do you need some free images/videos, like Smithsonian’s Open Access three million plus images, to work with?
Simple Image Capture & Editing
IrfanView is a simple program with powerful features. It can:
Open, view, save and convert image and video files
Scan images via a connected flatbed scanner
Create a slideshow of a folder of images (great for meetings)
Edit images and adjust color, brightness, contrast, saturation, gamma, resize image, canvas size, crop, add text, paint – adjust brush size, color, shape, type, fill, sample color, replace colors, flip, rotate, mirror vertically or horizontally, straighten, draw lines, arrows, shapes, add borders, frames, convert to grayscale, adjust color depth, invert to negative, show histogram, fix Red-Eye, sharpen, clone Stamp, and lots more!
Fast screenshot of selected area
Edit screenshots instantly when taking them
Copy images to clipboard or save to computer
Works on Windows, Mac, and Chromebook
Save images to an online account (but you don't have to)
PIXresizer, another oldy but goody for Windows, makes it easy to resize images to whatever dimensions you want.
This can be tough for image editing challenged folks like me, and it's great that PIXresizer makes the job easier.
With PIXresizer, what you see is what you get.
Fireshot works with Chrome and Firefox browsers. Get the free version or pay the one-time $30 fee for the Pro version.
Fireshot Chrome extension makes capturing long web pages a cinch. You can do the following:
Save screenshots as images
Save as PDF files
Copy images to the clipboard.
The $30 Fireshot Pro upgrade (one-time) offers even more amazing tools
Gifmaker.me, a website, makes it easy to assemble collections of images into animated GIF collections. GIFMaker.me allows you to
Create animated gifs, slideshows, and video animations with music online freely and easily, no registration required.
Create animated icons and avatars of yourself
Share multiple screenshots in one URL
Convert Video to GIF
Image & Video Background Removal
Need a quick way to remove the background of an image? Here are a few tools I've found you will enjoy. They are listed in order of my preference:
Remove.bg makes it easy to yank the background from an existing photo. Remove.bg works great on smartphones and tablets. Even easier is replacing the background with a provided image or your own picture. Example: See first image to right.
PhotoScissors does a nice job of removing the background from a picture. It limits high-quality results to for-pay options ($30 for Windows or Mac). Example: See second image to the right.
Lots of possibilities for background image removers given that green screen capabilities are missing on Chromebooks.
Want to learn more? Be sure to read the TCEA TechNotes blog entry, Background Removal Tools for Photos and Videos, for more choices and details.
Video Background Removal
UnScreen.com makes it easy to remove video backgrounds, which can be handy in a busy environment (like a classroom). Some features:
With Unscreen you can record your footage anywhere, then simply get rid of the background.
