1. Aviary – a powerful suite of design tools, including a full featured vector and image editor, as well as a color palette generator and custom filter and effects tool. All this horsepower runs from your browser. Laugh while you put the $300 you saved by not buying Photoshop in your pocket.

2. Pixlr - a basic image editor that allows you to quickly and easily edit images all from your browser window. Built on Flash, you will need a Flash plug in to get it to work. Pixlr is perfect for resizing and basic editing needs.

3. Photoshop Express – Adobe hits it out of the park with Photoshop Express. This web image editor is a lot of fun and has most of the tools you’ll need to get your photos ready for prime time. It has fun graphics to decorate your images, the tools to resize, crop, tweak colors and exposure, and correct red eye. It has a slick interface and is very intuitive touse. It gets the basics right and provides enough bells and whistles to make this a very solid choice for beginner and pro alike.

4. Picnik – easy online image editor with all the right tools to remove red eye, apply effects, and tweak color levels on photos. The site has tools to suit both the beginner and advanced user. You can also pull photos straight from any of several photo sharing sites including Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Facebook, Photobucket, Webshots. For more advanced features, you can upgrade to the premium level which will set you back about $25.

5. FlauntR – creative suite with a bunch of tools allowing you to do image editing, add neat photo frames and embellishments, effects, color matching and cool mobile wallpaper creator for mobile phones. Profilr, a tool devoted to tweaking the correct size for your favorite social network sites profile photos, is bookmark worthy for its own sake. Requires registration to use.

6. FotoFlexer – decent online image editor with many tools including the ability to retouch photos, add text, shapes, and work in layers. The site is overrun with ads and has features you may think twice about using, including glitter text, animated shapes, and funky filters. Still, it is very easy to use and there are no registration hoops to go through to get started. Just upload a photo and start creating.

7. Splashup – with a sleek user interface, Splashup takes a professional approach to image editing. The tools are robust including a font leading tool (hint: l e a d i n g), layers, filters, brushes and integration with your web cam. If you’re familiar with using *cough* Photoshop, you’ll like Splashup. The ad placement is unobtrusive and the site has a more grown up feel. It also plays nice with the leading photosharing sites like Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook. No registration required to get started, Splashup lets you jump right in.

8. Pixer.us – great basic image editor with no ads and no fuss. The tools are super easy to use and feature sliders to help you manipulate your image changes. The site focuses on the basics such as resizing, color enhancement, rotating and flip and offers some special effects. There aren’t a lot of bells and whistles but sometimes it’s just better that way. Pixer.us does the basics just right and there’s no registration requirement to play.

9. SumoPaint - a full featured editor that has all the right tools including layers, shapes, clone stamp, various brushes, magic wand, etc. The user interface is not intuitive but once you figure out how to upload a photo and then find it in your gallery, you’ll be good to go. The site is geared more for users who are adept with more sophisticated software editing suites.

10. Pixenate - nice basic image editor especially for the beginner. Has easy to use interface and includes tools to help you reduce red eye, crop, resize, rotate, adjust colors and add zany graphic decorations.

Bonus tool: Skitch – For Mac only, Skitch is a terrific image editor that is dead simple easy to use and will easily become one of your favorite apps. You can easily resize images, snap ascreenshot, annotate with circles and arrows and text, drag for easy saving on the desktop, and post images online with Skitch.com. Note: this image editor is a desktop app but it’s so addictive we wanted to include it in your arsenal of image editing tools.

Here’s our top ten of photo editors. Did we miss one? Let us know what your favorite is.

By Dolores Parker

If you use Photoshop, then you have a tool on hand that you can use to design labels. And, you don’t need to re-invent the wheel, because you have access to two great Photoshop tutorials at hand. The first tutorial, written by Pariah S. Burke, shows how to build and re-use a label template for items such as the business cards shown above.

Using Photoshop and Worldlabel Label Templates, Burke – a noted author, graphic designer and Photoshop guru – shows users how to create a template in Photoshop step-by-step. The result is a PDF that you can reuse over and over. And, if you’re not as comfortable with Photoshop as you are with Illustrator or even InDesign, Burke shows how the same PDF label templates from WorldLabel.com work equally well in those applications with a remarkably similar procedure. Read the complete tutorial at Photoshopsupport.com

Another tutorial, written by Linnea Dayton & Cristen Gillespie (authors of The Photoshop CS/ CS2 Wow! Book) for Layers Magazine, shows users how to design labels that you can modify quickly for related products. Using a label template from Worldlabel, they show how to use the PDF to create multiple labels for varied products, such as the label for the box shown below.

You’ll discover a world of easy ways to create labels through Worldlabel’s PDF templates and Photoshop. Just follow the steps in both tutorials and you may discover new ways to design your labels, too. Take advantage of what you have at hand to create some astounding works of art today!

Two great free excellent graphic editors you might want to try Inkscape.org and Gimp.org

In this post, I’ll stick to the many cool tools to choose from if you’re using a Windows-compatible PC. Stay tuned for future posts about Mac and Linux-compatible tools.

RoundMyCorners is a simple online image editing tool intended for people who just want to round the corners of their photos or graphics and don’t have or don’t want to take the time to learn an editing program such as Photoshop. All you do is click “Browse” and upload a JPEG, GIF or PNG image. Tell the program “how round” you want the corners of the image (in pixels) and what you’d like the background color to be, if not transparent. RoundMyCorners will give you back a PNG, JPEG or GIF image.

If you want to match text to photos or graphics for professional-quality labels, there are several free online “color pickers” that will save you the trouble of opening your file in an image editor and dragging out the eyedropper tool just to get the RGB or hex code for the color you want to match. One such program is ColorPic (image shown at right), which is a freeware Windows program. It has a built-in magnifier and mouse “nudge” function, and ColorPic also takes the guesswork out of selecting an entire palette of colors. A couple of programs designed to sample colors directly from the Web are Instant Eyedropper and ColorSchemer’s ColorPix.

Say you want to superimpose a picture of one of your associates over an image of your office and make a business card out of it to print on World Label labels or along with free printable business cards from my site, FreePrintableBusinessCards.net. A freeware program called Merge makes it a one-step process to incorporate elements of two images into one, join four images into a quadrant or merge text with an image. For instance, you could also use Merge to watermark your copyrighted photos on labels or other materials.

How about if you’re still in startup mode and haven’t yet had a company logo designed? CoolText is a graphics generator that can quickly serve up a logo based on a couple of dozen designs with the text, font and color of your choosing. In some cases, you can even upload your own background image. CoolText spits out a downloadable file in formats such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, Photoshop and .XCF (GIMP), ready to print onto labels or add to free printable business cards.

With all of these great tools, you can have fun designing your own labels without the headaches. Remember, if you’re using an online label-design template, such as those available from WorldLabel or FreePrintable.net, be sure to keep all artwork at least one-eighth inch from the edge of the labels.

Kevin Savetz is the creator of FreePrintable.net, a network of more than 25 sites that offer printable certificates, business cards, resume templates, and other printable items.