Graphic design and photo editing are increasing in popularity, in part because of the tools and apps that are readily available. It seems like just about every other person has a semi-professional camera hung around their neck with which they take pictures throughout the day, but even if you are not one of these people you probably take photos with your smartphone. With the photography and photo editing apps that are available you don’t need expensive equipment.

We took the liberty of cooking up a list of color palettes applications and photo editors available to Android users from the Google Play Store. With the applications are provided their original descriptions for your convenience. Check out this list of fifteen photo-editing tools for your mobile.

Color Palette Apps:

Image Color Picker

“Use your Android to detect a color that inspires you. It’s easy to take color inspiration from a photo in your library. Just touch a point and you can get color information.”

Magic Color Picker

“Magic Color Picker is a powerful color selection tool suitable for designers, artists and programmers for selecting colors using different color models. It supports 7 different modes and RGB, HSV, HSL and YUV color models. Use either palette or sliders to adjust. Colors are shown in decimal and HEX.”

Superdry Color Picker Demo

“Superdry Color Picker is color picker library for Android. This app is demonstration. This source code is available on the following links”: http://code.google.com/p/superdry-colorpicker and https://github.com/superdry/

Color Pal

“Easily find color palettes and schemes for any design project. Whether you’re a web designer or just looking to paint your son’s room, you’ll find some of the best color palettes/schemes available. Included are the HEX, RGB and CMYK color values which you can quickly email to for easy reference.”

Color Palette – Iromihon

“Iromihon is a color tool to adjust and to see. In full screen, it also works as color light (flashlight).” Three color modes are available namely RGB, HSB(HSV) and HSL(HLS) and there are two different lists named Web Color Names and User Colors.

ColorSnap

“Capture real world colors and match them to Sherwin-Williams paint colors—for free. With ColorSnap®, it’s easy to take color inspiration from a photo in your library or one you just snapped. Then choose matching colors or Ask Sherwin-Williams for recommendations.”

Drawing Apps:

Autodesk SketchBook Mobile Express

“Autodesk SketchBook Mobile Express is a professional-grade paint and drawing application designed for android devices with screen sizes of 7″ and under. SketchBook Mobile Express offers a dedicated set of sketching tools and delivers them through a streamlined and intuitive user interface.”

Scribbler

“This is the Free version of Scribbler. The free version has all the same functionality as the Pro version but is supported by advertisements on some screens and tags saved and shared images with promotional text at the bottom left. Scribbler is a touch drawing and finger painting app for Android devices.”

Photo Editing Apps:

Photoshop Express for Android

“Edit and share photos virtually anywhere. Touch to crop, rotate, adjust color, and add artistic effects. Access all your photos and videos directly from your free Photoshop.com account. Quickly share with family and friends. Requires SD card.”

Image Editor

“Image Editor is a simple Android app that allows you to edit images on your Android phone, or take some on the spot to expedite the image editing process! Share your images through facebook, twitter, tumblr, email, and more! Effects include color filters, blurs, tones and many more.”

BeFunky Photo Editor

“One of the most popular photo editors just got even better. BeFunky Photo Editor is now the only app that allows you to stack an UNLIMITED number of photo effects and edits, AND undo them! And even though YOU control the amount of each edit you make and YOU control how many are added, it’s still one of the easiest photo editors out there to use.”

PicSay

“This is the free Lite edition, buy PicSay Pro and get a host of extra tools, special effects, styles, stickers, and much more. The fun award winning photo editor. Color-correct your pictures and add word balloons, titles, graphics, and effects like distortion. All in a fun, intuitive, and easy-to-use interface.”

Photo Illusion

“Photo illusion” is a picture application that lets you edit photos with filters and effects.” Now you can apply filters and many effects on high-definition images (no limit on picture resolution); crop and rotate photos without losing quality; upgrade to Photo illusion Pro and get the full version with all features and no ads.”

Font App:

Fontest

“Fontest is a developer and typography tool that helps you quickly preview how your favorite fonts are rendered on Android. It includes 6 high quality free fonts; supports adding your own TTF and OTF fonts; supports smooth font resizing and custom display text; one-tap switch between uppercase and lowercase”

About the Author:

Ali Qayyum is a bizarre and successful Pakistani blogger. He is running his few projects like SamshingHub and uptenlist. Ali is addicted to Social Media, Web Development and lists. You can follow him on twitter @smashinghub.

Teamwork is about sharing ideas, finding better solutions, and having more productive work. Collaboration tools for designers are essential to improve their work with other team members and clients. The apps listed below will let you share your ideas and designs, so that you can communicate easily with clients or other co-workers.

FileSquare

Impress your clients with prototypes and simple feedback. With FileSquare you can share your work with developers and others designers, show it to clients and collect feedback with clear annotations in real time. This application could also perform usability tests with mobile interactive mockups. FileSquare is a tool for web agencies, software houses, freelance developers and designers.

IdeaScale

IdeaScale is a tool to practice brainstorming even at a distance. Designers should have a lot of good ideas. Why not to try a bit of brainstorming, involving co-workers everywhere? If you are heading for bright, creative ideas, IdeaScale is the perfect application. It can improve the generation of new ideas, comments, opinions. IdeaScale offers a suggestion box software and a platform to share, vote, and discuss feedback.

Marqueed

Share images the easy way with Marqueed. To allow a team to collaborate in the best way it may become necessary to share images. Marqueed does this with a simple drag n’ drop move. There are many other features, all interesting and essential in this kind of applications. However, there is also the possibility to work with external tools, as Google and, maybe, in the next months, Dropbox.

Cage

Keep track of revisions, upload images and videos, archive old projects with Cage. Cage is a very well known application for designers. It’s a collaborative tool that lets designers share their work. You can upload images or videos, create to-do lists, manage and assign tasks, and organize revisions. An interesting tool of Cage allows you to have contextual discussions on a frame or video directly in the timeline. Clients could approve work within the application. And when the project is over, you can archive it.

Draftboard

Draftboard is the collaboration tool made by designers for designers. This is another good application, with a simple interface, that allows easy upload of multiple file types. It makes the process of approving mockups between client and creative people very easy. The app lets people add comments and notes directly to the drafts, share the drafts, and create to-do lists. Draftboard offers a free plan and a free trial on paid plans.

Piktochart

Useful infographics for everybody. It’s likely that you’ll need infographics at some point in time, maybe for a presentations. Piktochart can be useful to design a professional, but quick, infographic. It has a powerful, very good editor and more than 50 design themes. It offers a free trial.

ConceptShare

A lot of tools in a professional app. ConceptShare is very good for sharing files and communicating. It’s a fast tool to collaborate on creative work online. Designers in different places could work together by uploading documents, commenting on them, and receiving feedback. ConceptShare is one of the oldest collaborative apps for creative professionals. Its interface is easy and elegant, while the app contains dozens of features. A free trial is available.

Conceptboard

Conceptboard is a simple white board at your service. Conceptboard looks a bit like Scribblar, but it is a bigger, more professional application. It offers the typical collaboration tools, as the possibility to draw freehand, to upload a document, image or other file, to edit them, to share ideas and files and to collaborate. Another good point of Conceptboard is the user-friendly interface.

Canvasdropr

Canvasdropr is the application that make navigating easy. Images, photos, MS Office documents get uploaded fast with Canvasdrop. The name of the app tells how it works: you “drop” on the “canvas”, as it were a blank sheet of paper ready to be filled. The interface is very simple and friendly to navigate. As in Marqueed, you can use external tools, as Google Drive, Instagram, Flickr, etc.

Cozimo

Cozimo is an elegant and friendly app for team work. Do you want to add notes to videos? Cozimo is the perfect application. Obviously, it is also possible to add notes to images and organize virtual interactive meetings in which team review projects. Another feature of this elegant and friendly app is the chance to specify the role of each member of the team and make files accessible accordingly.

About the Author:

Vanessa Li is young blogger that loves to write about business and designs. She is now working for a software company called Oursky. Find her on Twitter: @vanessa_oursky.

Cloud computing is revolutionizing the way web designers do their work, from designing to storing and sharing files. Instead of having to rely on one local computer or server to access software and projects, designers now have the ability to access these elements anywhere, and on any device. This technology has made collaboration easier than ever, with the ability to quickly share and discuss ideas, mockups and finalized designs quickly and easily with very little time spent arranging the logistics.

Below outlines more about the cloud and how it can benefit you as a designer.

How the Cloud Works

The internet is structured so that all the digital files that make up websites are stored in central, physical hard drives. Then when an internet user makes a search, these servers respond by displaying the correct website or search results on the user’s browser. The cloud – instead of putting all the weight of supporting files on one of these servers – uses the servers collectively, as a client-server mechanism. It utilizes certain resources from a combination of the hard drives to lower barriers and deliver information more quickly. If you’re looking for more information, this cloud computing guide by Xero provides a helpful foundational understanding and a pretty funny video of people trying to explain the cloud themselves.

More importantly for designers, the cloud’s reliance on the collective group of servers allows it to hold powerful tools, applications and software that can be accessed from anywhere.

To put the concept of cloud computing into context and to help you visualize it in action, think about the answers to these questions:

1)   Do you have a Gmail or other email account?
2)   Have you ever used Google Docs to share working documents with others?
3)   Do you have pictures and videos on your Facebook or other social networking site?

If you answered yes, then you have used the cloud. The convenient ability to access your email from anywhere and on any device has been around for a while, but most people don’t realize that it is known as cloud computing. Google Docs is a newer application of the cloud, and makes sharing and editing documents as a team much easier in folders contained in the web. The same goes for keeping photos and posts on social networking sites.

You get the picture. The cloud greatly increases speed and convenience, and offers many more benefits.

Benefits of Using the Cloud for Design

While means of transferring files have improved over the years, evolving from floppy disks to flash drives to email, the cloud removes the need for physical drives to hold files. Ever been working on a design for a client and lose everything due to hardware failure or your operating system randomly freezing before you got the chance to save? Working directly from the cloud will almost always prevent the frustration associated with this, as many will save your files automatically in the cloud. It’s easy to revert back to the timestamp where you left off.

Another major benefit is the simplification of working remotely from your client. Rather than having to coordinate sending files back and forth via email and arranging meetings to discuss the work, you can simply save your work into a shared cloud storage folder and your client or boss can easily access the files at a time convenient to them.

Here are some cloud storage services already popular in the design community:

Dropbox
Many have discovered the reality of Dropbox’s slogan, “Simplify your life,” as it is probably the most popular cloud storage application. An incredibly user-friendly app, Dropbox is free to sign up and also offers professional and business plans. The free plan allots you 2GB of storage, which can be increased through a referral system. This is a great way to jump from computer to computer and access your documents whenever you need them, without having to worry about carrying a flash drive around.

Basecamp
Basecamp is the leading project management app. It’s great for designers, because it holds and organizes all the files of a project in one place: including discussion feeds, files and documents, which can be shared and worked on by team members from anywhere. You no longer have to worry about your computer or software crashing and losing your work or trying to email files to your team that are too large to attach. The security, organization and collaboration features of this app make it well worth its small fee.

Adobe Creative Cloud
This is perhaps the most exciting cloud app for designers. No more paying huge sums to install software on your computer and then having to pay more to upgrade a few months later. Membership to Creative Cloud enables you to use the latest Adobe products, like CS6, as well as design print, apps and video. You can sync your files from any device and share them with a team or work individually, as well as obtain exclusive features.

Downside

The only real drawback of the cloud is its reliance on internet connection. If you don’t have access to the internet, you don’t have access to the cloud. This can be especially problematic if you have internet connectivity issues or you’re dealing with bandwidth killers on your connection. It might be a good idea to continue to back up your files for such a situation, but if you take care of any internet problems and have a reliable source, the cloud is sure to make your design work much easier.

About the Author:

Rob Toledo loves CSS3, no longer supports IE7 or lower and still prefers Firefox over Chrome, despite pressures from his management to switch. He can be reached on Twitter @stentontoledo

While Photoshop, Fireworks, and Illustrator may be the most feature-rich and popular options for web and graphic designers, sometimes there may be situations where a lighter option would be preferred. Opening Photoshop for very simple image edits isn’t always the most efficient option. I have searched and reviewed these 5 image editors that are easily available for download. These software are light, fast, really easy to use, and have all the necessary image editing tools required for simple jobs.

Now I do not disagree that Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks are the life blood of the  industry. But having said that, all these software are also complicated for some users, strains the CPU, have really large sizes, and most importantly carry a price tag. So if you are a small time user who wants to perform relatively simple edits to images, you would certainly hesitate in shelling out for such software. And that’s quite understandable.

After all, why would someone pay hundreds of dollars for Photoshop if he/she just has to change the color contrasts or lighting of an image?

Also the number of available free image editing software is also quite large. So large that it may confuse you beyond measure. In an effort to work around this confusion we present yo 5 free image editing software that are light, fast, easy to use, and gets the job done.

1. FastStone Image Viewer

This software meets all the criteria that we have set for it. It is light (only 5.13 MB), fast, free, and have loads of important features. The most striking amongst them is its ‘full screen’. When you go full screen and move your mouse to the edges of the screen, different types of tool menus will drop down.

The available features include Clone stamp, different types of lighting adjustment, a screen capture tool, conversion to grayscale, sepia, and negative colors, red-eye removal, an image comparing facility, a great image viewer, a versatile slideshow feature, and some other significant smaller features. In addition, this software has an astonishing amount of tools and controls to retouch the color of an image.

Now when I list down the features like that, it may seem very long, but when you compare it to Photoshop and other such software, it lags behind by miles in a number of features. But the comparison with Photoshop is unfair. This software is only 5.3 MB and when compared to size of size of Photoshop, which is in GBs. It’s beyond belief to see so many features packed in so less a size. This software has an easy user interface, is light weight, and works fast making it the best software for performing simple edits.

2. PhotoScape

PhotoScape is another free image editing software that is steadily gaining popularity among professional photographers and designers. It has a great feature of converting digital camera image formats like RAW into PNG, JPEG and other main stream image formats. Just like FastStone, it is also a great image viewer and has the standard image editing features such as clone stamp, crop tool, lighting adjustment tool, and color adjustment tools. However the most important features of PhotoScape are batch editing functionality, a color picker tool, and file rename tool. It’s a little bulkier than FastStone, around 20 MB (still way too lighter than Photoshop), but the number of features are comparable to its size.

3. IrfanView

First launched in 1996, IrfanView has now become a widely accepted choice of an image viewer by many photographers and designers. It is really small (1.6 MB), fast, compact, and really easy to use. IrfanView is one of the best options to view PSD files without opening up Photoshop, which takes lots of time to open. Thus it’s a very useful tool in watching the contents of multiple PSD files at a glance. It is also a good image editor with powerful and efficient conversion tools that can convert multiple files at once. It’s a great tool for embedding a watermark, cutting, cropping, effects like sharpen and blur, and metadata editing.

4. Inkscape

Inkscape is an open source freeware that could be used to create and edit vector graphic files. It is the best free option to create and edit SVG files and have features that are comparable to bulkier and paid software such as Adobe Illustrator and Freehand. Its size is only 34 MB and the image sizes it creates are highly optimized to facilitate usage in web. Inkscape is small, fast and light. It uses an open source vector graphic format known as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and is already a choice of web-designers for creating vector images. Its number of features is not comparable to illustrator, but it has some features that illustrator doesn’t have; such as direct editing of SVG sources, one click paint bucket fill, and direct painting of objects.

5. GIMP

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is your all inclusive, free solution to all types of basic image editing needs. It’s free, fast, small (only 77 MB), and has so many tools that will make a graphic designer forget Photoshop. While that might be an intended exaggeration but atleast dramatically reduce his/her dependency on it. For all other non-graphic designers, it is a complete image editor with all the most used tools of Photoshop and could be used to perform varieties of edits to all types of raster image formats. And the best part is that its open source, thus free for use.

About the Author:

Gaurav Agarwal is associated with WPIntegration, a specialized division of ipraxa – which is a full scale solution providing web agency, offering services like Convert PSD To WordPress Template and Integration with WordPress (the third party application). Subscribe to our Blog RSS or follow us on Facebook, Google+ , Linkedin or Twitter for updates on WordPress Integration Service.

Photoshop actions can be a great help to designers and photographers who want to be able to quickly achieve different effects with photos. There are a wide variety of action sets available for photo editing and touch ups, some are free and some must be purchased. In the past we’ve showcased number of different Photoshop actions and sets in our blog posts, and today we’d like to present this post that includes links to more than 50 of the best action sets that you’ll find anywhere. The post is separated into two sections, premium actions and free actions.

If you’re looking for some quality actions for editing your own photos, take a look at the sets showcased here and I think you’ll find some great options. With a total of more than 50 action sets listed, you’ll find a wide variety of types of actions.

Premium Photoshop Actions:

Faux HDR Actions

HDR Legendary Pro

Golden Hour Photo Effects

Vintage Summer Actions

Master Photography

Sunrise & Sunset Actions

Magical Memories

Ibiza Sunset

Cross Processing Actions

Colorplay

Autumn Actions

Photo Designer

Portrait Actions

Drama and Contrast

Professional Retouching

Background Removal Pro

High Fashion Photo Effects

Caliente

Film Effects

Special Effects

Premium Actions Set

Fresh Summer Actions

Vintage Autumn Actions

Premium Glamour Effects

Polaroid Vintage Dream

Hollywood Movie FX

Dream Actions Pro

Vintage Premium Photo Effects

HDR Image Enhancers

Vintage Photo Actions

Magic Skin Retouching Actions

Eye Doctor and Dentist Actions

Color Lab

JHP Vintage

Skin Retouch Pro

Studio Light Actions

Florabella Luxe

Retouch and Makeover Actions

Free Photoshop Actions:

The Wise Watson

Cross Processing Actions

Hipsta Mini Set

Mini Fusion

Texture Applicator

Touch of Light and Touch of Darkness

High Definition Sharpening Actions

Burnt Edges

Black White Sepia

Blue Action

Retro Collection

Finishing Touches

Sunlight and Sundown

Rich Color Actions

Vintage Action III

Spring Light

For more Photoshop actions please see:

• 45 Amazing and Free Photoshop Actions
• 35 Fresh and Free Photoshop Actions
• 50 Fresh Sets of Photoshop Actions
• Photoshop Actions for HDR Effects