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Splashup, formerly called Fauxto, is a free online photo editing tool. Splashup is available over the Internet. No software needs to be installed on the computer. Only a web browser is required to use Splashup. Splashup allows you to edit many images at once, and it works on all browsers. If you are already familiar with tools like Photoshop or paint.net, it will be easy to work with Splashup.

This guide will give you all the basics you need to use Splashup effectively. Let us, start this tutorial by familiarizing ourselves, with the Splashup user interface.

Familiarizing the Splashup User Interface

Take a look at the Splashup interface and familiarize yourself with the various controls. A few minutes, spend for this, can save a lot of time later, when you work with Splashup. I am telling this from my personal experience. If you are familiar with the Splashup interface, you can skip the rest and move ahead with the Lessons. The interface has three parts, a top section, left side bar and right side bar. Let us start with the Top section. This section has the Menu bar containing all the important menus and menu items. Left Side bar has the tool box. Tool box has all your image editing tools. Right Side bar has the info, Color and layers pop-up.

Splashup Interface

All these components can be dragged and positioned anywhere on the Splashup screen. Info pop up displays the coördinates within the image. You can Zoom the images, using the Zoom control found towards the top right.

Splashup Lesson 1 : Resizing the image

This is one of the most basic task that you need to learn. Many photos you import from your camera or other sources into Splashup, may not be fit for publication due to size constraints. Let us first import and image into Splashup. Go the File menu and click “Open Image” menu item. Pick an image from the your desktop or any of the social networking sites listed in the import wizard. Select the image menu item (top ) and then click image size. Specify the width and height to resize the image.

Splashup Image Resize

There is constraint check box available to re-size the image keeping aspect ratio. Enable the constraint and change the height, you can see that the width automatically adjusts. This very handy in keeping the original image aspect ratio during the resize.

Next lesson in our Splashup tutorial series is about adding Text to an image.

Splashup Lesson 2 : Adding Text to Image

Adding text to image is one of the most frequent activity you may need to do. It is kind of watermark on the image. You can add the author name, location or copy right information to the image. First import the image to which you want to add the text into Splashup. Importing the image is explained as part of Lesson 1. After importing the image, select the Text tool from the Tool box. This tool has “A” as the icon, available in the tool box, towards the left side bar.

Once you click the Text tool, notice that there are many options displayed below the Main menu bar, found at the top. Using these options, you can change the font, font size, font color, style etc. Select the options you want and click on the portion of the image where the text is to be inserted. Type the text, press enter. You are done. Save your work using File -> Save image menu.

Splashup Lesson 3 : Using Layers

Before we go ahead to work with layers, let us understand what are layers. Layers are like a stack of sheets bundled together. You can see through the transparent areas of a layer to the layers below.  The opacity of the layers can be adjusted to make it transparent or opaque.

You use layers, to do tasks such as adding text to an image, compositing multiple images etc. Let us, take the case of adding text to an image to understand the point.

In this case, image is a layer and you add a new layer on top of the image (text layer) so that, the text is just superimposed on the image. That’s all about layer theory.

Let us get into some practical stuff.

We are going to add a blue tint to an image to learn to work with layers. Let us learn this in 5 steps.

Step 1 : Import the image

Go the File menu and click “Open Image” menu item. Pick an image from the your desktop or any of the social networking sites listed in
the import wizard.

Step 2 : Add new layer

Once the image is successfully imported, go to the Layers pop-up and Click the + button to add a new layer. You can also do this by going to the Layer menu and clicking the add layer menu item. It is a best practice to give meaningful names to the layer. This can be done in the Layers pop up. Let us give the name “original-image” to the first
layer and name the second layer to “enhanced”. You can give any name to the layers. Naming is for our convenience to work with. Note  that, opacity of both layers by default, is 100%. Keep it that way.

Step 3: Change the foreground color

Select the layer named “enhanced”, by clicking it in the Layers pop-up. Next step is to change the foreground color of the layer to green (You  may select any color ) . To do this, click on the foreground color choice square. This square can be found towards the bottom of the Tools sidebar. Pick the required color using the Color pop-up. Next, select the paint bucket from the tools sidebar. Click on the image. You will be surprised to see that the entire image is replaced with the color selected. Don’t worry.  This is because our layer is having the opacity value of 100%. We need to increase the transparency such that the underlying layer (original-image) becomes visible.

Step 4: Adjust the opacity

Go to the layer pop-up and cut the opacity value to 50% . That’s it . Your image is now having a green tint added to it. You can experiment with the opacity values and pick the one best suiting the image.

Splashup Layers

Lesson 4: Adding a Drop Shadow to Text

Drop shadow is a very handy effect in creating a logo. You may want to create a logo with a nice drop shadow for your website. To do this, first create an image, using File -> New Image, having 400 pixels width and 100 pixels height. Select the Foreground color square from the Tools box. This is towards the bottom of the tool box. For this lesson, let us stick with white color. Pick white color using the color pop-up. Select the paint bucket tool, from the tool box and click on the image.

Image is now having a white filled up color. Select the Text tool (This tool has “A” as the icon, available in the tool box, towards the left side bar) from the Tool box.

Once you click the Text tool, notice that there are many options displayed below the Main menu bar, found at the top. Using these options, you can change the font, font size, font color, style etc. Select the options you want and click on the portion of the image where the text is to be inserted and type in the text. Notice that, the layers pop-up, now has a new layer added to it.

This layer will be having the A icon. Give some meaningful name to the layer. For this tutorial we are naming it as “logo text”. Click on the Magic Wand icon found near the right side of the layer name. The Layer Effects, pop-up window will be displayed. Pick the Drop Shadow effect from the options list and click Add.

This will show the options for the drop box with its default values. Click the Ok button. We are done. You can see that your logo text is now having a nice shadow.

That completes our Splashup basics tutorial. Hope you have enjoyed the tutorial !. Stay tuned for the Advanced tutorial on Splashup.

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About prem

Google: +Prem I am a technology enthusiast interested in electronics, internet and computer science. I am passionate about mobile phones, science and advanced technological innovations. I have vast experience in electronics and computer science. Join me on Google+ I dream of a future that relies on clean energy, a future that is pollution free , a future where technology is put to the benefit of the human kind all over the world.

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