Alienation Digital offers a very nice quick loading Image Editor for Joomla 1.5 for quick online image editing.

When we came across Alienation's Image Editor, we just had to take it for a spin, the concept of editing article images online without having to load up Photoshop and then FTPing the images back to the server for just a small crop or resize sounded very nice.

AD Image Editor allows you to load an image from your PC, a URL or the Joomla image folder and it supports JPG, PNG and GIFs and automatically converts the image to 72dpi.

You can save the image back to the server or your local PC in any of the three formats as well.

The image browsing in the Joomla image folder is quick but limited to just displaying the file names, there are no thumbnails so unless you are certain of the image name and location, you will do some hit and misses until you find it.

Once you have chosen your image and delivery option, the non-Flash web based editor loads up extremely fast as it simply uses the MooTools library to render an image editor that is surprisingly desktop like.

The interface is really smooth, you can resize the image area, un/fold the toolbar, drag and drop individual tools anywhere on the page, of course having a large monitor helps here.

It offers your basic options like color picker, zoom in/out, rotate (90° CW & CCW, 180°), flip horizontally/vertically, crop and image resize and a very handy action History to revert back to earlier actions.

It also comes with several filters that you can apply at will:

• Negate
• Grayscale
• Brightness
• Contrast
• Colorize
• Highlight edges
• Emboss
• Gaussian blur
• Selective blur
• Sketch
• Smooth

Unfortunately, these filters tend not to be that useful; we would like to have seen filters like rounded corners or Polaroid frames.

The editor is only available in the component drop down list in the administration back end, it would have been a huge step forward if it was available from the article editor when editing articles.

We also had some issues trying to crop a larger image that spanned larger than the image window but this function worked great on smaller images.

The editor works flawlessly in Firefox 3, IE7 and Chrome, in fact it is lightning fast in Chrome.

The AD Image Editor has many things going for itself, and with the addition of more useful filters I can see this as a great addition to any Joomla site.

NOTE: Alienation Digital has lowered the price to £9.99 (app. $14.50) per licensed domain.