Digital Image Manipulation

Final digital image manipulation product.

I was extremely excited about this unit’s technology implementation. In high school, I took a class called Video Technology and part of the class had to deal with digital image manipulation. We focused in that class on using Photoshop, and the full version too. Since then, I have not used this technology because I thought it was only available for a pretty large cost. I was glad to see that there are free options out there for digital image manipulation. In the classroom, I could see this being used by students when doing projects and they need to create an image of some sort to go with their topic. I could also see this used in education simply to make professional looking posters for classrooms and schools.

The first thing that I had to be sure of was that the free software worked on Windows. For example, Seashore is a software that is optimized to run on Mac. The next thing I did was look for options that seemed user-friendly mainly because I would like to implement this by having students create things with it. Having used Photoshop in the past, I was very interested to look at the free version. While I found it very easy to use and convenient because it was available on any device, including my iPhone and Surface tablet, I found that really it was just a nice photo editor. This is great, but I was interested in doing more with digital manipulation for school. Gimp, Pixia, PaintTool SAI and CorelDraw all seemed a little more advanced than what I wanted for my students. Also, CorelDraw has a free trial but does cost money if you want to use it more than a few times. While Paint.net also seemed interesting at first due to how much it looked like the old Paint that I grew up using on PCs, it was comparable to Gimp and Photoshop Express so I also nixed this one. I was really excited about PicMonkey until I saw that it was a 30 free trial and mandated a credit card to continue. Finally I decided to use Ribbet. While some of their features are only available for a cost, you do not even have to set up an account to use their free features. I was able start working immediately on their site and create a collage of upcoming technologies in the classroom.

After creating my product (shown above), I was asked if I wanted to create a free account and it would save my product, but I was also able to save it to my computer. When I created the account I saw that Ribbet also has many other products that you can create and order such as pillows, phone cases, coffee mugs and so much more. I love this site and can see it being of great use in both the classroom and my personal life!