Pixlr

Pixlr

Pixlr.com is a photo editing tool.

It is similar in functionality to Photoshop Express with all of the basic features you would expect - such as brightness and contrast, hue and saturation, crop and rotate.

This is a lightweight, effective and free application - and the package itself is Flash based so requires no installation. Just open up the website, click the link to begin creating and dive straight in.

When you have finished, simply save your work onto your own computer - no registration is needed.

The Art of DeTouch

The Art of DeTouch

The media is often criticised for presenting a distorted view of society with fashion magazines and Sunday supplements crammed with images of impossibly beautiful people.

But they are not as perfect as they look.

DeTouch.org lays bare the tricks and cheats used in photographic publishing, showing you what those picture perfect models looked like before the touch-up artist got involved.

Drawing from a number of online sources where before and after photographs are displayed, this site uses an open source tool called Processing to compare the images pixel by pixel and generate visualizations of the alterations.

Waists are sucked in, chests pumped out. Lines and shadows smoothed and removed.

There is even one lady who has had an eye shifted up - all in the pursuit of creating the illusive perfect beauty.