Are you looking for free and affordable applications that will make your web life easier? Look no further! Here are a handful of add-ons that streamline the graphic design process.

1. Skitch.com

Skitch.com enables users to more quickly capture screen shots and drag them into email for sharing. The software automatically saves and names files to speed up the process. You can even annotate images with text and sketches and share them with colleagues. Use Skitch to show an image to a colleague or client and get their quick feedback on it.

Requirements: Max OSX 10.4.6 and higher
Cost: Free

2. Adobe Kuler
Kuler is an online application that’s also accessible through CS5 software. Use Kuler to generate color schemes for print and digital projects.

It’s got a community feature for sharing ideas and is a great source for color inspiration. Since it’s built into CS5 software, folks with the Adobe Creative Suite don’t even have to open a browser window.

Requirements: n/a
Cost: Free

3. Firefox Colorzilla & Google Chrome Eyedropper
Depending on your preference of browsers, these two add-ons will help you pick up any color you see on the web, analyze it and recreate it. It’s great for when you’re browsing sites such as logopond.com and want to repurpose an interesting color combination for your own work.

Requirements: Current versions of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox web browsers
Cost: Free

4. Lorem Ipsum Generator

It’s an industry-wide practice to flow dummy Latin text into a mock-up layout. The Latin helps designer’s see what the piece would look like with content. Instead of digging through old files to copy and paste dummy-text, use the Google Chrome Lorem Ipsum Generator add-on to create fresh text for each project.

Requirements: Current version of Google Chrome web browser
Cost: Free

5. Adobe Air Shrink O’Matic

An add-on application for Adobe AIR that lets you resize images in large batches. Perfect for getting files ready for the web. The app handles JPGs, GIFs and PNGs, and lets users set the output sizes, file names and end-formats.

Requirements: Adobe AIR 1.5
Cost: Free

6. Adobe Ideas Application for iPad & iPhone

A great tool for iPad and iPhone users who want the ability to sketch ideas on the go. The application integrates with Adobe Creative Suite software, so it’s easy to import ideas when you get back to work.

Requirements: Compatible with iPad and iPhone OS 3.2 or later
Cost: Free

7. Mac Rabbit CSS Editor

A CSS editor perfect for graphic designers who want to create beautiful websites using style sheets. This editor is easy to use whether you are a web expert or a beginner. The visual editing tools, don’t   dumb down the code, but instead help novices to learn to use CSS as they go along.

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5 or higher
Cost: Free trial or $39.95 to purchase

You can create some very stunning pencil sketches, pen and ink drawings or paintings the old fashioned way if you have the time and materials. Since I don’t have the time, materials or the skill, I’m using version 1.95 of FotoSketcher on my Windows PC.

A few years ago, I found a nice Photo to Sketch utility that I used to make a picture for my online avatar. I also found an online tool to create sketches from photos. However. I was blown away by all of the features in FotoSketcher. It’s free, it’s not a big program, and it’s also available as a stand-alone executable file.

Even though it’s simple to open a new picture in this app, it may take a while for you to figure out the multitude of effects that you can apply to an image. Here’s an example of a picture that I found on the author’s website.

This looks like a very nice oil painting, but the author started with a real photo he found on Stock.xchng.

Below you can see a video tutorial I found at the FotoSketcher website.

Download FotoSketcher:

http://www.fotosketcher.com/

Techie Buzz Verdict:

This little freeware application takes photo tweaking to the next level. It makes it possible for an average joe to create real art with almost no training and very little time. I can easily give it a highly recommendedstamp of approval. (Note a before and after I tweaked our stamp with FotoSketcher to make it look like a colored pencil drawing).

Techie Buzz Rating: 4/5 (Excellent)

Are you looking for free icons to be used on your website, or are you looking for high quality for your desktop. Browsing and searching them on the Internet is not that easy, so having a place to find all the icons in one place definitely helps.

Related: 6 Places to download high quality wallpapers.

IconArchive is definitely one of the best places to find high quality icons in one place for websites and your desktop including Windows icons, Mac icons and Linux icons.

The best part of IconArchive is that, all of the icons are neatly categorized making it easier to browse and find the type of icons you are looking for.

IconArchive currently hosts over 19,400 icons in 707 sets from 169 icon authors. Icons can be used for Windows (XP, Vista, etc.), Macintosh (OSX, OS) and Linux (as PNG Files). The list is bound to grow with newer icons being submitted everyday.

So the next time you want to find some icons, head to IconArchive and you will definitely find the icons you are looking for.

IconArchive

How many times have you come across a wallpaper that is not the right size for your desktop? Do you simply setup the wallpaper even though its resolution does not match your desktop resolution?

There are tons of services which will help you make your image sizes smaller than their current resolutions while providing same or lesser quality but what if you want to increase the size of the image to a higher resolution? Have you been able to do it without degrading the image quality?

Reshade is a solution which allows you to resize your image without losing any quality. The major factor that makes Reshade better than others, is the fact that it allows you to increase your image resolution up to 20 times without incurring any loss of quality of the images along with the normal features of down sizing your image resolution.

How Does Reshade Work?

Reshade has both a online and offline version using which you can resize or enlarge the resolution of your images.

Reshade Online

Reshade Online has a easy to use interface and you can resize your images up to 3x times from the original resolution. Using the free online version you need to choose a image from your computer or provide Reshade with a URL to the location of the image.

Once you have uploaded the image you can choose the resolution you want to resize it to along with having options to center the image, stretch it and more. I gave the service a try and found pretty good results with the online image resizing.

This is the original image I used to resize to a bigger resolution, the original image size was 341 x 126 pixels

Below is the image resized to a resolution of 800 x 295. Click on the image to view the full image.

As you can see the quality of the image is almost intact and that is why Reshade can be quite a useful service for you.

Reshade Offline / Desktop Tool

Reshade also has a pretty useful desktop image resize tool which will allow you to increase the image resolution by up to 20x times which is quite good indeed.

The Reshade desktop resize tool allows you to easily resize image from the confines of your desktop. There are various options you can choose from while resizing a image. You can either use the zoom option or enter in a size you want to resize in the image to. In addition to that you can also control the quality, smoothness, texture, accuracy and threshold of the resized images.

The Reshade desktop resize tool has quite a simple interface and can be used by anyone without going through much trouble.

Reshade Desktop Resizer Features

• Innovative scaling algorithm – allows for over 2000% enlargements with no loss in clarity
• Easy to use interface – simple adjustments, with quick preview
• Fast access – use keyboard shortcuts to open and save files
• Drag and drop – open files directly from your Internet or file browser
• Multiple file types – support various formats including JPEG, PNG, bmp
• Standard image modes – can use CMYK, RGB and grayscale images
• Video tutorial – see a quick intro to the Reshade features
• Automatic updates – get notified when a new version is released

Innovative Processing Tools

• Control – have the best control over image clarity. Remove blur and highlight curves
• Soft Edges – get smooth, precise and consistent contours for all "Edge Control" values
• Smooth – remove image defects easier, directly from Reshade.
• Texture – extract even the finest details from your images. Contrast and enhance image features
• Accuracy – go from smooth edges to perfect estimations of the original image lines
• Threshold – make selective edge transformations
• Best Edges – get even better color estimation with just a little more processing time
• Quality – choose between speed or better quality for the resized image

The desktop tool is not available for free though and the price for it is $149 per license. The folks at Reshade are offering the desktop tool at a 51% discount, so you can get the product for $74 if you purchase it before 25th June.

Summarizing

Reshade definitely provides users with a nifty feature that many image resizers do not provide you with. So the next round if you have found a perfect wallpaper for your desktop which does  not fit the resolution of your desktop you know where to head.

This is a definite must have tool for designers and photographers so go ahead and download a free trial and if you like the product purchase it before 25th June to get a 51% discount.