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The term "digital graphics" covers a huge range. Whether it's megapixel-sized digital photos, or teeny-tiny little icons and graphical bullets, they're all digital pictures. The image manipulating tools you might be most familiar with tend to be more useful for things on the larger end of that range. But what if your work runs to the other end? Icons, sprites, little ornaments; these can be a bit of a challenge when you use Photoshop to tweak them.

Pixen is an app designed specifically for "pixel artists", the folks who live in this land of the little. Even though it's simple in design, it boasts some big features. It supports layers, which means that you can work on different elements of your images independently—the background can be separate from shadows which can be held apart from your main subject. You can save your work in all the normal Web-usable formats, as well as several others. Along with individual images, it's also easy to build animations to save as GIF files, QuickTime movies, and more.

Pixen is a free download for your Mac. It runs under OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and later. You'll also need to have QuickTime 7 installed on your system.

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Nothing's ever quite the way you want it. Just ask Goldilocks: chairs, breakfast, beds, nothing really worked for her. If you've got a pile of image files, you may be familiar with that concept. This picture is too big; this one is too small. Fire up Photoshop to fix them, and you're committing to a long, hard slog—as well as several bills—to get the job done. Faster and cheaper might be nice.

Pixer is a Mac tool that lets you tweak your graphics files. Choose an individual file or a whole folder full, drag them onto the app, and let go. Choose how you want them resized—you can specify a pixel number, percentage, or choose from presets for specific sizes, as well as being able to rotate and flip images, or crop and pad them. It supports most popular image formats, so you can probably use it for whatever you're working with.

Pixer is a free download for Mac users. You'll need to be running at least version 10.4 of OS X (10.5 for some advanced features) to use it.

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There are two types of image files that are commonly used by computers. First are those that record on a pixel-by-pixel basis what will appear at each location in an image, often referred to as bitmap or raster graphics. The second is one that rather than a list of dots and colors actually contains instructions to the software you use to view it as to how that application should render the image, all expressed as a series of lines, curves, and other mathematicaly-expresssed information. The advantage to this second, "vector", style of graphics is that they scale well. With a bitmap, if you increase- or decrease the size of the image, you can end up with a fuzzy or pixelated image, whereas with vector images, they'll always look right.

No matter which type of image you're interested in, there's a high-priced tool you can use to manipulate those images, whether it be Photoshop for the former, or Illustrator for the latter. DrawBerry tries to horn-in on the game that Illustrator plays, but with the added advantage of a greatly reduced price tag. This tool has a full complement of tools including magnifying glass for precise placement, and it supports layers as well as CoreImage filters.

DrawBerry is a free application for Mac systems. It runs under OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and later.

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Did you ever get a file—probably an important one—in a format you couldn't open because you didn't have the right application? That FLAC audio file or RAR archive isn't going to do you any good if you can't open it. You need to be able to convert files from what you can't use into files you can use.

Dragoman is a Mac-based batch file conversion tool. It does the standard stuff—convert your images to PDFs or turn Word DOCs into text files—but also maybe some things you didn't expect, like converting between various archive formats. It's easy to use—the "drag" part of its name suggests the type of interface, although the Help file explains that the word is actually of Middle Eastern origin and means "translator".

Just drag your document or media file onto the app. It recognizes the type of file you've got and displays an appropriate list of file formats that you can choose from to do your conversion. It supports a pretty good sized list of archive, audio, image, and text file formats, and even though there are some popular formats it can't translate into, even some of those can serve as the source for translation into formats it can work with.

Dragoman is a free Mac application. It runs under OS X version 10.4 (Tiger) and later.

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It's nice to have an interesting image for your desktop wallpaper. Whether you're making an artistic- or maybe political statement, or just want something pretty, wallpaper can fill the bill. But it does tend to just sit there. I suppose that makes sense—after all the wallpaper in your dining room just sits there, right?

If you'd like for your wallpaper to earn its keep, maybe it's time to change your wallpaper. Maybe it's time to take a look at Wallpaper Clock. As its name might lead you to believe, these selections of wallpaper also serve as a clock on your computer. Specifically, these wallpapers update the time shown once a minute, so you're always up to date, even if your system clock isn't showing. There are bunches of different designs available to choose from, so you'll probably find one that works for you.

Wallpaper Clock selections are available for free; just find one you like and download it. For full functionality, you need to also grab a clock engine application to run the show. These are available for free as well for Windows, Mac, Linux, and even iPhone. Note that the "recommended" Windows app is only a 30-day trial, but in the "Other programs…" list below it on the download page, there are other free apps to choose from.

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There's nothing like a pile of indecipherable data. Whether it's a log of visitors to your website, or fluctuations in the price of tea in China, just having a bunch of numbers doesn't really help you to analyze and understand the world around you—or at least it doesn't without giving it some serious thought. Sometimes it's a lot more helpful if you can look at things graphically as a flowchart, bargraph, or in some other right-brain-friendly medium. It's easier to spot trends, for example, if you see a line sloping upward (hooray!) or downward (oops!), than just a jumble of digits.

If you're tying to gain mastery of your data, a tool like yEd might be your ticket home. It supports oodles of different layouts and and symbols, so there's bound to be a way you can make your data talk to you. It's easy to work with, as you can rearrange all the tools and palettes to make sense for your work style. And you can export your results into a bunch of different bitmap and vector formats, suitable for including in reports or posting on the web.

yEd is a Java application. If you've got the right JRE on your machine, it'll run anywhere, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and more. For some of these, it'll work even if you don't have the right runtime, since it's included with the download. Sweet!

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When it comes to graphing equations, the picture that's normally worth a thousand words is probably worth a thousand numbers as well. Once you start graphing anything interesting, your graph paper and pencil start to fail you. You could go buy an expensive graphing calculator, but why spend all that dough?

EdenGraph is a graphing calculator for Macs. Along with all the arithmetic, algebraic, and trig functions you'd expect, it also has built-in constant values for pi and e. Enter your equation–algebraic, trig, or whatever–and it plots it for you. Tweak your values and it updates automatically. You can zoom in to get up close and personal, or zoom out to get the big picture. Tweak colors for your plot as well as the background, axes, and grid. When you're all done, print your handiwork out, or save your graph as a TIFF, EPS, or PDF, or even copy it to the clipboard to paste into another application.

A free download, EdenGraph is a Mac application. It's a Universal Binary, so you should be able to use it on both your PowerPC and your Intel machines.

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If you're a blogger worth your salt, you're uploading pictures to support your posts. If you create web pages, you're adding visual interest by sticking some photos, drawings, and other stuff up there as well. Dealing with all those images can be a bit of a pain.

Take image sizes, for example. For your visitors to have the best online experience, their web browsers appreciate it when your web page tells them what size your images are. Unfortunately it's not always easy to know what those width and height numbers are. Finder won't tell you, so often it means that you have to fire up your favorite high-powered image editor and look at image properties to find out what size they are. That's a bit like using a canon to swat at mosquitos. That's where Dimensionizer comes in.

This little tool puts image size information into the context (right click) menu for you. Just right-click on an image file in Finder and you'll get the filename along with the height and width of the image and the image resolution to boot. Now you can add that important information to your web pages and know that you've given your visitors a hand. Their browsers will love you for it.

Dimensionizer is a free Mac application. It requires OS X version 10.2 or later.

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How many times do we hear that a picture is worth a thousand words? Too many, no doubt. While a photo or drawing can help to point something out or demonstrate a problem, often the picture by itself isn't enough. After all, books and newspapers add captions to photos for a reason: the picture doesn't necessarily always tell the whole story.

If you're using pictures to tell a story, you might want to take a look at Skitch. This tool lets your take a screenshot of a web page or desktop application, and then add your own annotations to it. A picture's good, but when you add an arrow and a note—look at this widget, right here—and everybody will know what the excitement is all about. Or grab an image from your machine and have at it. Your annotations—circles, arrows, text—are all held in a layer separate from the image itself, so you can drag them around the canvas without messing-up the underlying picture. And it's easy to save your new-and-improved image to the desktop or upload it to any server.

Skitch is a Mac application. It runs under OS X version 10.4.6 and later. It's a Universal Binary, so it should be equally at home on PowerPC and Intel-powered Macs. The current release is a public beta, so it may behave in unexpected ways.

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It's always amazing to me how the human brain works, trying to organize and extract meaning from seemingly meaningless stimuli. We all know that the pictures on the TV screen and images thrown against the wall by a movie projector don't really move; rather our brains take a series of still images and supply the "tweening" such that we see motion even when there is none. Or take a look at the pictures in a newspaper. There's not really a line or shape in most of them; instead it's a bunch of larger- and smaller-sized dots against a white background. You see shapes and a zillion different levels of gray because your brain fills-in-the-blanks to make us "see" pictures.

HyperDither is an interesting app that deals with this "see dots as images" thing. Built using the same same dithering filter used to convert grayscale images to black and white for early Macintosh computers, it takes your image and converts into a bunch of dots, to rather interesting effect. It's easy to use, as you can either browse to the file you're interested in, or just drag and drop your picture into the app's main window. You can even grab a whole folder's worth of files if you want to go nuts with it.

A free download, HyperDither is a Mac application. It runs under OS X (10.3 and greater) and is a Universal Binary, so you can use it on your PowerPC or Intel system.

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