I’m hopelessly hooked on Photoshop, but people often ask me what they should use for photo editing and I’m loath to recommend anything so expensive. I tried The Gimp, and while it’s as close as you get to free Photoshop, it’s a pain to install and not particularly easy to learn.

Enter Picnik. It’s not only free, it works in a browser, so it doesn’t matter if you’re on Windows, Mac or Linux. It’s also much more user-friendly than either Photoshop or The Gimp. The one down side is it’s slow. But if you only edit photos every so often, it’s the perfect answer.

Me? I’m sticking with Photoshop. But I’m delighted to have another free tool to commend to others.

Last May, with remarkably little ballyhoo, Google substantially changed the way it delivered search results. It’s surprising that there wasn’t more of a ruckus, given that people care deeply about their Google rankings. My inner librarian weeps for how much search engines are used and how little understood.

In any event, one of the highlights of PodCamp was when John Ellis tackled this subject head on. And here’s a great take-away….

Search engine optimize (SEO) your images. With the new Universal Search, images often show up at the top of a generic Google search. There are three easy ways to do this:

1. Give them great filenames. For example, to SEO an image of myself, I could name the image happy-web-diva.jpg or anna-belle-leiserson.jpg, instead of my usual abl.jpg.
2. Use the alt attribute. Hopefully you are all doing this anyways, as this is a well-documented requirement for making web pages accessible.
3. Add an image caption. Actually it’s been a concern of mine that it’s not easy to caption photos in WordPress. I’ll plan on trying the Image Caption plug-in next time I use a photo.

Thanks, John, for a most helpful presentation.

Do you ever wonder how to round the corners of your photos? I used to. If you use Photoshop a middling amount, it’s not that hard. It’s simply a matter of learning “masks.” Masking is a graphics art concept that’s somewhat counter-intuitive until you do it a few times. So my advice… don’t read about it; just do it.

Once you know the trick, you’re not limited to rounded corners. You can do all kinds of cool things with photos and shapes, though rounded corners is probably what you’ll use most. Here’s how….

Step 1. Find your photo and prep it, including shrinking it if you need to. (Mr. Web Diva was climbing trees again yesterday — and taking gorgeous photos at the same time, so I’ll use one of those.)

Step 2. Duplicate your photo in the layers palette.

Step 3. This is the easiest step to forget and it won’t work without it. Between the two photo layers, insert another layer and fill it with your page’s background color (in this case white).

Step 4. In the next to top layer (layer 3), put a rectangle with rounded corners using the shape tool.

Step 5. Click on the top (photo) layer, and then enter the Layer / Create Clipping Mask command. Voila. A photo with rounded corners.

Extra credit. For step 4, instead of using the rounded rectangle, go wild. Use a free-form shape, draw something yourself, or use a large font like this….