Category: Imaging Tips

Picasa 3.8 was unleashed upon the world a couple of days ago. It brings with it several major features, such as Batch Upload, something called "Face Movie," which creates an animation out of a series of images of the same person, and last but certainly not least, Picnik photo editing. That's right – Picasa can now upload your photo seamlessly to Picnik, and it allows you to edit it there, ...

Mugtug is one name (and website) for two distinct, and equally impressive, image editing/creation applications: Darkroom is a sophisticated, in-page photo "adjustment" software. Note that I don't use the word "editing." That's because you can't really make selections (unless you want to crop or mirror). You can, however, adjust any image parameter (such as white balance, exposure, contrast, or ...

Image Resizer Powertoy Clone is a neat, free Windows utility, that doesn't forget to give credit where credit is due. I've never used the original Powertoy, but I can tell you its clone lets you very easily batch-resize image files. You get a single context menu entry (yes, another one) that says "Resize Pictures". When you select several image files and click this entry, a simple-looking dialog ...

CHDK, or Canon Hack Development Kit, can magically turn your regular Canon PowerShot into a professional workhorse capable of shooting RAW files, displaying live histograms, motion detection and even executing Lua script. Seriously, CHDK takes almost any PowerShot camera and turns it into a device that is probably worth twice as much as you paid for it. Just being able to shoot RAW images is ...

Ah, viewers! Whether you love the fact that they exist, or hate the fact that we live in a world that necessitates them, file viewers are a vital part of any computer user's tool kit. The number of times I've seen sent a Microsoft Word file and not been able to open it... ugh! Fortunately I have Photoshop, but I'm sure there are lots of people out there that don't -- that's where PSD Viewer ...

If your mind is reeling with the recent wealth of screenshot-related tools that I've started posting, don't worry; I will soon be writing a comprehensive roundup pitting them all against each other. Until then, I must thank reader nomi49 who left a comment for my SPGrab post that recommended Lightshot from Skillbrains. Lightshot sets itself apart with two main features. The first is a ...

Adobe Photoshop CS5 has a new feature that digital artists have been demanding for years: it's called the HUD Color Picker and I'm sure it's making Photoshoppers dizzy with excitement. That is if they even know it exists -- you see, the HUD (heads-up display) is buried under a truly atrocious shortcut: Shift+Alt+Right Click. Still, if you have Photoshop CS5, try it -- you can see it in the ...

Screenpresso, my favorite free utility for taking screenshots, has just updated to version 1.1. The most notable change in this version is that Screenpresso can now "clean" transparent title bars in screenshots; this means that even if you take a screenshot of a window in front of another window, it would still come out crispy-clean. This was one of the major features which "Goliath" Snagit had ...

Rejoice! No longer must you hack and slash at your preferences folder to backup or share your workspace -- there's a script to do it for you! Simply grab the script, unzip it, then Files>Scripts>Browse in Photoshop. The ingenious engineers at Adobe are obviously hard at work on CS6, and this script is likely an early example of what we can expect in the next iteration of the Creative ...

Flickr Image Search does exactly what you might think -- mostly because it's a very early beta version and doesn't actually do anything other than search Flickr. Install the Chrome extension, click the Flickr icon, search... and voilà! Quick and easy thumbnails. Click a thumbnail and the Flickr page opens in a new tab; neat! It's certainly not without issues -- for some reason it ...

If you use your digital camera for anything other than family or touristy snaps, you've probably run into the raw image format. If you haven't heard of raw, think of it as a bigger, high-quality JPEG file. Unlike JPEG, raw files contain a lot more data, enabling you to manipulate your photos a lot more easily. With JPEGs a lot of data is lost -- if you shoot raw photos, you have more choice over ...

Despite its despotic, glaring omission of vowels, you can probably guess what Bulkr does. That's the power of brand recognition, eh! If you can't work it out, here's a clue: bulk + flickr = ... Specifically, Bulkr does two things -- and it does them well. First, you can download your entire Flickr stream -- either as one big stream of images, or broken into directories for each of your Sets. ...

HDR, or 'high dynamic range imaging', is a popular term in photographic circles at the moment. Love it or hate it, HDR, thanks to the digital camera, is here to stay. To that end, Adobe has finally given us a half-decent interface for conjuring up blindingly over-shiny and under-achieving HDR photographs. Dubbed 'HDR Pro', it replaces the God-awful interface present in CS4. Whether it will make ...

One of Photoshop CS5's most talked-about and exciting features is its new 'content-aware' algorithm. Either for spot healing or filling arbitrary areas, the content-aware tools provide a new and surprisingly-veracious replacement for the clone brush and other antiquated methods. The screencast is only a few minutes long, and even if you you haven't used Photoshop before, you will find the ...

Liquid Scale is an iPhone / iPod Touch app that allows you to resize images by removing unimportant elements in the photo, leaving the important ones untouched. It's a technique called seam carving that we've previously mentioned, but what's interesting here is that it's now available to be used on the iPhone. For those that are unfamiliar with it, the seam carving technique analyzes images to ...