Graphic tools

This page provides a list of graphic tools for your web pages.

GIF Animation

Look at this
Image Editors Price
1 Coffeecup Image Mapper $29
2 Xara Extreme $79
3 Adobe Photoshop $199
Animation Editors Price
1 Xara3D $44.99
2 BlueSquad $59.95
3 Adobe Flash $699
Photo Editors Price
1 Adobe Photoshop $199
2 Photo Recovery $39.95
3 Xara WebStyle $79

There’s an ocean of competent graphic tools out there. As always, you need to know what you’re looking for. Those listed are among the best or most popular ones on the market. Or both.

  • Animagic GIF
    Animagic GIF Animator builds animations from individual frames or from existing animated GIF's. Users can drag and drop files, easily control loops, frame rate, transparent color, reduce number of colors, copy/cut/paste frames, add/delete comment frames, add effects and more.
  • PhotoImpact GIF Animator
    The product is impressive. Using its fabulous feature, you can create moving text, transition effect, cube effect, and a lot of thing to make your page alive. Did you see the moving banner that say "What's your problem?" on the main page? That was created by this program.
  • WebImage
    WebImage is an image manipulation program used to enhance, optimize, and create graphics for the World Wide Web. Support for GIF, JPEG, and PNG, allows conversion of graphics to standard web formats. Image content can be optimized for increased compression and decreased download time.

Transparent GIFs

Here are the sources to get your transparent GIFs softwares:

  • GifWeb
    Converts GIF, BMP, JPEG, TIFF, etc. files to transparent background GIFs. Supports dithered color backgrounds. Optional grey, black or white background. Easy to use and intuitive.
  • WebImage
    As displayed above, this program offer you animated GIFs, transparent GIFs, server-side and client-side image maps. I've never tried it but their pages looks nice.

Graphic Utilities

  • Xara WebStyle
    Xara WebStyle lets you create top-quality, custom-designed, web-optimized graphics - buttons, bullets, dividers, 2D and 3D headings and backgrounds - any color, with any text.
  • Xara 3D
    Xara3D is a new "slimware" program, designed to produce high quality 3D headings, banners and animations. It offers very high performance, high quality results, and is so simple even "your grandmother could use it".
  • Xara Webster
    Xara Webster imports a range of vector and bitmap formats, exports as JPEG, GIF or in Xara's own vector format designed specifically for use on the web. It uses techniques such as anti-aliasing, colour reduction, dithering and transparency to produce the best possible web graphics in the smallest possible file space.
    You can download a trial version from http://www.xara.com/downloads/webster.html
  • GIF/JPEG SmartSaver
    Another product from Ulead. The new version is coming out. Check at their site. I have tried the program. It's very useful to save GIF/JPEG in small file.

Image Editor

  • Adobe Photshop 4.0
    An image editor tool for professional web designer.
  • Ulead PhotoImpact
    PhotoImapct with web extension is a useful tool to create web graphic. If you don't want a ton of hard to learn features from Photoshop, take this moderate price product as your alternative.
  • Paint Shop Pro
    A sophisticated version of PaintShop program in Windows, Paint Shop Pro is an easy to use image viewing, editing and conversion program, supports over 30 image formats.
  • CorelXARA
    CorelXARA is a high-performance drawing and graphics illustration tool. It offers a number of significant advantages over any alternative; not only can you produce graphics more quickly and effectively, but you can also easily experiment freely (thanks to its infinite undo) using CorelXARA's unique tools and effects.

Image Map

  • CrossEye
    CrossEye is an image-map editing utility that enables you to create clickable hotspots on graphic images. These hotspots may be linked to URL addresses, providing your webpage's readers with an instant jump to any website(s) you have chosen. CrossEye allows everyone to create "client-side" clickable image maps which do not require any additional server support.
  • LiveImage
    LiveImage is a very user-friendly, "don't know anything about this image mapping stuff" program. Make your first Client Side Image Map with embedded Hyper Links in less than 5 minutes. LiveImage is very easy to use.
  • Mapedit
  • MapMaker
  • MapThis
    A freeware program that automates the process of image map creation. It knows about the formats for the NCSA, CERN, and Client-Side Maps.
  • Splash! ImageMapper
    The Splash! ImageMapper allows users to graphically create and edit HTML image maps, for easy inclusion in their own HTML pages.
  • Web Hotspots 3.0
    Interactive image editor for Web authors. Creates images, imagemaps, and associated HTML. Advanced image composition features include layered anti-aliased area/text fills, compositing, alpha channels, and numerous graphics effects. Writes JPEG and GIF images and all standard types of Web maps. The integrated test functions can be used to validate URLs on the Web and interactively arrive at best image quality/load size tradeoffs.

Last updated July 04, 1998

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