I recommend a number of programs that can either do everything you need, or at least part of it. What do you do if you don’t want to spend the big bucks or the time to learn these programs? There are plenty of alternatives that will get the job done. I have Photoshop on my machine, but I do most of my image work in Fireworks, also owned by Adobe. While Photoshop is a powerful tool to use for manipulating images, it also comes with a steep price tag, and an even more steep learning curve. Web designers use tools like Photoshop to do just this. How can you avoid this problem of distorted and slow-loading images? The answer is to optimize images before loading them onto your website. This makes for long page load times (frowned upon by Google) and may cause visitors to quickly leave your site.
This is usually due to the fact that people take a picture with their camera, upload it to a website, and adjust the display dimensions without actually changing the properties of the image itself. Have you ever been to a website where the images are distorted or grainy looking? Maybe you noticed that the images appear small, but take forever to load.