Category: Imaging Tips

Tilt-shift photography, if you haven't heard of it, is a technique that results in only one small area of a photo being in focus. This tight area of focus often results in the photo appearing to be made up of miniatures, rather than real people and objects. The effect typically requires a special (and often expensive) tilt-shift optical lens. If you don't have the money for the real thing, or ...

The Mac's built-in PDF support is pretty strong, which is nice because if there's one piece of software I have always despised for its unnecessary bloat, it would be Adobe Reader. To be honest, I've always liked the fact that when I come across a PDF online, clicking to open it results in it being downloaded and opened in the built-in Preview application. Opening PDFs in the browser was always ...

The folks at Aviary are at it again and today released their latest webbased photo tool called Dodo. Unlike any other photo editing tool, Dodo allows users to age people, places and things. So for instance, if you wanted to see what you might look like in say 25 years, you would upload a picture of yourself and choose different settings, set a year and click to generate. See below screenshot of ...

Okay, just admit it. You know you want to. We can admit it, so we're sure you can. You want us to do it for you? Alright then, here it is: You suck at Photoshop. See, it wasn't so bad, was it? The truth is, most people suck at Photoshop. But most of us also wish that we sucked a little less at it. Luckily, if your ego can handle it, Donnie Holye has created a hilarious and educational series of ...

We are big fans of free, open-source alternatives to brand-name software, and one of the best examples of this is GIMP, the full-featured Photoshop rival. Like any good forward-thinking software project, GIMP has a plugin architecture which allows for any shortcomings or missing features to be remedied by a helpful developer taking the time to create the necessary add-in. techZilo has compiled a ...

Anyone who uses Adobe Photoshop regularly has probably learned to both love and loath Adobe's signature product. Despite being the top-contender in the image editing business, Photoshop is still missing some features. For example, out of the box, Adobe Photoshop has no option to save files as .ICO or icon files. One option is to make a bitmap (.bmp) image first and then rename it to .ico . ...

If you're an iPhoto user and want an easy way to upload your pictures from iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums (Google Photos), then check out Google's Picasa Web Albums Exporter iPhoto plug-in. The plug-in is available as part of a package from Google's Mac tools site (if you don't use iPhoto, you can use the standalone Web Albums Uploader program to upload your pictures to your Picasa albums). Once ...

Photology, set for public release today, is a new photo cataloging and organizing software that will help you make sense of all those photos named "DSC00012.jpg" or something equally unremarkable on your hard drive. Who really has the time at this point to go back and "tag", or group into folders, or make sense of the traffic choke of photos, years in the making, on their computers? If you've ...

If you've ever spent much time manipulating JPEG images, you know that although the JPEG image compression algorithm is very effective at spitting out relatively tiny file sizes, that effectiveness comes at a cost. JPEG is what is known as a lossy compression algorithm, which means that in order to achieve the compression rates that it does, it basically throws away image information, and attempts ...

LightZone, the RAW photo converter, can cost you hundreds of dollars for the Windows or OS X versions, however, the Linux version is free. LightZone is a powerful photo editing software package based on tonal zones with an easy intuitive interface. The Windows and OS X versions are available in a Basic edition for $150 and a Full version for $250. The Linux version is functionally equivalent to ...

You've got to love a program with a clever name, and who doesn't like a shot of rum? So right off the bat, I was predisposed to like RumShot. This free little Windows application allows you to apply themes to your screenshots as you take them. The results end up looking pretty remarkable. There's no installer to fuss with; simply unzip RumShot to a folder and go ahead and run it. Of course ...

Mapwing is a neat little application that allows you to create your own virtual tours from digital photos and then share them online. If you're familiar with IPIX for watching video online tours of real estate, etc., then Mapwing is a very similar tool, but done with photos instead of video. Best of all, the basic package is free and you can create the tour yourself using Mapwing's online ...

If you've had a digital camera for any length of time, by now you have thousands--maybe even tens of thousands--of digital pictures of anything and everything. And if you're like most people you've cheerfully imported them into photo management software of some sort. Maybe it's something like NikonView that came with your camera or maybe it's the copy of Photoshop Elements that came pre-installed ...

I've been tinkering around with the Mac version of that new Photoshop CS3 beta Adobe unleashed, and I have to say that so far it feels like a more significant and worthy upgrade than CS2. Adobe has packed a lot of new goodies in CS3 which we'll be covering in our Imaging Tip series, and today's tip praises the return of true memory management to Photoshop. As you can see, the Performance tab of ...

I have been using Paint.net for a while now, and it really is a decent editor. Everyone who needs something more powerful than the Microsoft Paint that comes with Windows, but can't figure out Adobe Photoshop needs to take a look at Paint.net. The new alpha release (for testing only of course) has a multiple document interface, which is one of the biggest improvements in the new version. ...