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Picasa 3 Beta Unleashed
I know from the countless emails I receive that most of you
really like Picasa, the free photo manager and editor from Google. Well, stand
by for Picasa 3. The beta version is now available and it has some really useful new features. These include basic movie editing, improved web album
syncing, photo retouch tools, a new ‘quick view’ facility, five new collage
styles, a new text in photo ‘watermark’ utility, updated import from memory
card facility, a screen new capture option, and there’s a newly designed
toolbar. As usual you install beta software at your own risk, and you should
back up any essential data beforehand, but it seems very stable and well worth
a test run.
13/10/08
Versatile Viewer
You can never have too many picture viewer programs on your
PC. If you are into digital imaging then you have to stay ahead of the game and
have up to date software that can handle new and old file formats, as well as
all the variations in between; then there are the apparently intact image files
that stubbornly refuse to open in normal file viewers. You also need to be able
to convert from one format to another, singly or in batches, read hidden EXIF
data and fiddle around with the image. If your image viewer can do all that
then fine, if not you should definitely have a look at XnView, and if the name
sounds familiar, it comes from the people who brought us the handy XnView Shell
Extension that we featured a few weeks ago.
XnView can read around 400 graphic file formats and export in
50, there’s a good range of tools, it reads EXIF data, it has a slideshow
facility, many printing options, including contact sheet, there’s TWAIN
support, and I could go on, but don’t just take my word for it, check out the
feature list for yourself.
09/10/08
Make YouTube YourTube
YouTube is great, well, some of it anyway, and even
occasional visitors will see a video that they would like to download to watch
again or send to someone else. There are lots of recording utilities on the web
but this one, called Better YouTube
has to be one of the easiest to use. It’s a Firefox add-on and it only takes a
few seconds to install. Thereafter, if you see something you fancy simply click
the ‘download this video’ link that appears just below the player screen and
the download of the chosen video, as an .flv file, starts automatically.
Incidentally, if you haven’t got a .flv player on your PC then I can thoroughly
recommend the subject of a previous Top Tip, called VLC, which plays just about
anything. There’s a link to the download on the PCTopTIps Software
page.
01/09/08
Picture This, Easily!
As you may know you can make icons manually out of ordinary
JPEG and bitmap images, by fiddling around with the size and format. It’s easy
enough, just a bit time-consuming but why bother? Here’s a simple one-click
solution, called Easy PictureIcon.
Just select your image and it is automatically converted to the three commonest
sizes (16 x 16, 32 x 32 and 48 x 48 pixels). All you have to do is decide if
you want to compress trim or fit, select background transparency, and where to
save it. Go on, give your desktop a makeover, and don’t forget, you can change
the icons in most applications simply by replacing them with one of your
choosing, providing it’s the same size and has the same filename.
21/08/08
Right-Click Photo Utilities
Here’s an ingenious little program, or more correctly, a
Shell Extension, called appropriately enough XnView Shell Extension
that adds extra functionality to your right-click menus. Simply download and
install the program and when you next open Windows Explorer, or My Computer,
navigate your way to a folder containing image files. Right click on one of
them and you’ll see a whole load of new options appear, including info about
the file, the option to convert the file into .gif, .bmp, .jpeg, .pcx, .png.
.tiff or .tga format, set as wallpaper, view as a variable sized thumbnail, and
much more. Give it a whirl, I think you will be impressed!
14/08/08
Jing’s The Thing…
You probably can’t see it in the photograph but at the top
of the screen there’s a yellow dot. That’s Jing,
an ingenious ‘always-on’ capture program that does just that. Click the dot and
Jing starts to record anything you can see on the screen, be it a still image
or a video, and if there is any sound that goes with it, it’ll capture that as
well. It’s optimised for uploading to the web but you decide where your capture
files go and the options include a local folder on your hard drive, a network
folder, the clipboard or sharing sites such as Screencast.com and Flikr. Images
are stored in .png format whilst videos are .swf files. Needless to say it’s
free, but the authors clearly have their eyes on turning it into a commercial
product, and if this introductory version is anything to go by that may not be
too far off, so get it while you can.
11/08/08
Fast Batch Resize Crop and Watermark
Here’s a solution looking for a problem. Let’s suppose you
have a quantity of images that you want to crop and resize in a hurry, and at
the same time, convert them from one image file format to another (jpeg, png, gif
or tiff), and while you are at it, you also want to add a time/date stamp and a
copyright watermark.
We’ve all been there and usually the only way to do it is
one at a time, using an image editing program, well not any more! All you need
is iKnow
Batch Crop, and that’s really all you need to know. It’s incredibly easy;
there are just three simple steps. Step One asks you to create a folder to
store your modified pix in. In Step Two you select the picture you want to
process and in Step Three you decide the shape, picture format, time/date and
watermark, click OK and it’s done!
16/06/08
Free Tourist Terminator
We’ve all been there… You find yourself at some exotic
location, trying to take a once in a lifetime picture of a famous landmark or some
picturesque scenery when a gormless tourist, car or bus wanders into the frame.
There’s nothing like an articulated lorry or daft-looking stranger to spoil a
classic, potentially award-winning photograph, but what can you do?
The answer is simple, keep still and shooting. Take as many
pictures as you can then when you get home run the images through a piece of
software called Tourist
Remover. It’s ingenious, it checks the images, finds all of the bits
without moving objects, tourists and so on, then stitches them together and hey
presto, a clean photo with no hideous holidaymakers spoiling the view.
13/12/07
No More Hiding Behind Pixels?
You may recall the recent case where a paedophile was
identified from pictures he had posted on the web, even though his image had
been scrambled, so how was it done? That particular case wasn’t terribly
difficult because he had chosen to ‘swirl’ his picture, which left most of the
detail intact, albeit twisted around in circles. Several readily available
programs can undo swirls but even if he had used that old favourite –
pixellation – it might still have been possible for the authorities to come up
with a useable picture. You can try it for yourself, on the Vectormagic website. Just upload a
pixellated image and let it get to work on the blocks and see what is revealed;
anyone trying to hide behind pixellated pictures consider yourself duly warned!
03/12/07
Screen Capture is a Snap
If you ever need to take a snapshot of what you are seeing
on the screen then you’ll know Windows has a couple of features that puts an
image of what you’re looking at into the Clipboard (PrtScn for the whole screen
and Alt + PrtScn for the Active Windows or dialogue box) but it’s not very
convenient. Here’s a much better way, it’s called MWSnap and this
excellent little freeware program lets you take a ‘snap’ of any part of the
screen. You get to see instantly what you’ve captured, there’s a resizable
ruler (horizontal or vertical) so you can accurately measure your image area,
you can save the captured image in any of the popular file formats, set up hot
keys and much more besides.
15/10/07
DVD to Just About Anything Converter
It’s all very well having one of those multimedia gizmos,
PSP, iPod and so on, that play videos, but if you can’t convert your DVD to the
format it requires you are stuck. Worse still, you could be corralled into paying
for a download, quite possibly for movies that you already own on DVD or
tape. What you need is a DVD ripper,
and there are a few to choose from, but this one, called Handbrake, has something
for everyone. To begin with it’s a multi-platform, freeware open source
program, which basically means that in addition to the Windows versions, there
are variants for Mac and Linux users as well, and it’s versatile. It will
convert almost any DVD, be it PAL or NTSC, into an MP4, MKV, AVI or OGM file,
which covers most of the popular players. It supports Chapter selection and
there’s basic subtitling (they’re burned into the picture if required).
05/10/07
Build Your Own
Camcorder for £15!
I know the holidays
have begun, so I hope I’m not too late, but if you, or anyone you know is
visiting the USA this summer ask them to pop into their nearest CVS Pharmacy
and buy up a couple of ‘One Time Use’ camcorders. They cost around $30 ($25 if
you can find one with a discount tag) and the idea is you can shoot around 20
minutes of video, then you return it to CVS for processing and you get back a
DVD of your movies.
Here’s a clever bit,
the camcorders were designed for single use, but there’s a way of hacking them,
to make them re-useable, and it really works – here’s one I made earlier. The
first thing to do is add a USB cable, it’s not too difficult but it helps to
have some soldering skills. After that you all you have to do is download a
piece of free software called Saturn, and you can copy your movies from the
camcorder to your PC, wipe the memory and use it again. You can even change settings,
like resolution and frame rate.. The actual camcorder is small, very easy to
use and although not as sophisticated as proper digicams, I have to say the
picture quality isn’t half bad. There’s an easy to follow guide, showing how to
dismantle the camcorder and fit the cable, plus links to the software download
at: Bigfatgeek.net
06/08/07
Perk Up Those Pix
If, like me, you have been playing around with digital
photography for a while you probably have some old pix taken back in the day
before megapixel image sensors. I actually have some files taken on prototype
and first generation digicams from the mid eighties with a then show-stopping 640 x 480 pixel resolution, and at the time few ever
thought it would catch on, but I digress…
If you have some old whiskery jpegs lurking on
your drive then you might like to try running them through a freeware program
called JPEG Enhancer. It really works, as these shots of my
daughter, taken in 1998, just about show. In actuality the improvements
are much more impressive. You can adjust the degree of enhancement and you can easily
judge the effect in the before and after windows.
04/07/07
Picture This -- ASCI Art Returns
I’m afraid showing my age again and I well remember, back in
the sixties, seeing computer generated images of well-known personalities made
up of alphanumeric characters. It seemed pretty impressive back then but as
computers got smarter and better able to display real images the technique
virtually disappeared. Now it’s back, and if you pop along to Photo2Text.com you can have all sorts of
fun uploading your own images and converting them into text. Watch out, there
is a 200kb size limit, but you can easily resize your pix using a freeware
editor like Photofiltre.
13/06/07
It’s Raining On Your JPEGS
If you have a digital camera you have got to try this one! Sqirlz is an ingenious
little freeware program that lets you add pools of water, oceans, lakes or
ponds even rain or snow to your pictures. It automatically creates realistic
looking reflections but here’s the good bit, you can animate it, with ripples
or wave effects and add perspective. Afterwards you can save the file as an
animated GIF, Macromedia Flash file or AVI, or you can save it as a JPEG or TIFF.
It’s brilliant, and great fun to play around with!
0806
Wipe Out Those
Obstructions
Here’s a clever
little freeware photo editing tool, called PhotoWipe, that lets
you erase obstructions and remove things in your pictures that you would rather
not be there, the bars in front of this goat, for example. It could just as
easily be used to remove objects and people and all you have to do is ‘paint’
the item black, with a selection of brushes and tools. The program looks at the
surrounding unpainted area then takes a stab at guessing what should be there and
fills in the gap. It’s not perfect and the results can be a bit variable, but
on images where there isn’t too much obscured detail or the background where
the erased object would be are plain or textured it can do a pretty good job.
18/05/07
Protect Your Pix With Branding
If you upload your photographs to websites, or ebay, for
example, what’s to stop someone pinching them? The short answer is not a lot, but
if they are marked with a copyright symbol or some other trademark that you will
be able to positively identify them if they turn up elsewhere. The process of
visibly tagging an image with a symbol or logo is called watermarking and you
can do it with most image editing programs but it can be a palaver, especially
if you want to watermark more than a handful of pictures. The solution is a
simple little freeware utility called Image Brander. It’s
really easy to use and lets you add your own copyright mark, custom logo or
indeed anything you like to your photographs, either singly or in batches.
11/05/07
Colour me Moody
The colours in a photograph can have as much, if not more
impact on the mood than the actual detail. So what happens when you take the
colours or palette from a cold, sunny or vibrant picture and use them in a
graphic?
It’s an interesting exercise for designers and normally you
would need some fancy image editing software to do this sort of thing, but now
you can do it online, by visiting the Pic2Color website. It couldn’t be
simpler, just enter in the URL of the photo who’s colour you want to use (right
click on the picture in your web browser and select Properties and copy link,
or in Firefox just right-click and select Copy Image Location). Do the same
with your graphic then click the pic2color it now button in the third window
and your graphic is automatically recoloured using the photograph’s colour
palette.
04/04/07
Print Anywhere, From Anywhere
Has your printer ever packed up or run out of
ink at an unfortunate moment? Maybe you’ve been on the road and needed to print
out something important but have no printer to hand. A freeware utility called PrinterAnywhere could get you out of
a tight spot. It lets you use a printer on any XP or 2k PC that has a network
or Internet connection, in exactly the same way as you would if the printer was
connected to your own PC and the printer in question could be in the next room,
or on the other side of the world. All you need to do is download
PrinterAnywhere on your PC and the computer with the Printer, set up a simple
password and away you go. It works with any Windows application that uses a
printer, including of course Word, Outlook Express and so on, and best of all it’s
really easy to set up and use.
26/03/07
What Microsoft Left Out of Vista
Whatever else you may think about Windows Vista you’ll have
to agree that many of the included wallpaper images are stunning and several of
them were shot by 24 year old Kuwait-based photographer Hamad Darwish. Hamad had only been
snapping for 2 years when he was ‘discovered’ by Microsoft, after his work had
been published on the photo sharing website Flickr. But what’s really
interesting are the pictures that didn’t make it into Vista, and some of them
are truly breathtaking. You can read the full story here and if you would like to see more of his
image in all of their glory you can download 1820 x 1200 resolution copies from
Hamad’s personal website.
14/03/07
Print Pixel Calculator
Confused by digital camera specs? Just how many megapixels
do you need to take decent photographs? The pixel count baffles a lot of people
newcomers to digital photography, and when asked most experts glibly answer,
‘the more the merrier’ but if all you want is to take some decent looking
holiday snaps that you can print out or view on a PC screen then you could be
hustled into paying over the odds for a camera with features you’ll never use.
That’s where the design215 Megapixel and Maximum Print Size Charts come
in. They show, at a glance, how many pixels you need for a given size of print
or resolution. For example, you can get good looking 8 x 10-inch prints from a
6 or 8 megapixel camera, but if you want to go large, up to 16 x 20 inches, and
achieve true photo quality, then you need to be thinking in terms of a 24
megapixel model.
12/03/07
Ultra Simple Free PDF Creator
PDFs or Portable Document Format files, in case you didn’t
know, are the most convenient way to send illustrated documents, instruction
manuals and so on by email or over the Internet. It’s the closest thing we have
to a universal format and PDFs can be read on just about any PC (Windows, Mac,
Linux etc), all you need is the free Adobe Reader program to display the file.
Making your own PDFs is another matter, though. Until fairly
recently the only way to do it properly was to buy a copy of Adobe Acrobat but
there are alternatives, and this one, called doPDF
is one of the best I’ve seen. It’s free and very simple to install and use. In
fact all you have to do is download the file and it installs itself as a
‘virtual’ printer.
You can create a PDF from any Windows program with a print
facility. Simply open the document, image or file you want to convert to a PDF
then go Print on the File menu, select doPDF from the printer selection
drop-down menu (unless you have chosen to install it as the default printer).
Click OK and it creates a PDF file in the location of you choice, and that’s
all there is to it!
07/03/07
Poster Printing Made Easy
Fancy yourself as a bit of a snapper? Got any pictures
that you think deserve to be blown up to fill a wall? Well, here’s the easy way
to do it. Upload your image to website called Blockposters (max file size 1Mb), tell
it how big you want it to be, in terms of A4 sheets, click a button and moments
later a PDF file, containing all of the components of your poster is ready for
you to download from the website (no email addresses are needed) and it’s ready
for you to print. No fuss, no mess.
05/03/07
DIY 3D Laser Scanner
If you enjoy experimenting with your PC here’s
something a bit out of the ordinary. It’s called DAVID. Basically it’s a
freeware program, developed y two German computer scientists at the Institute
for Robotics and Process Control at the University of Braunschweig, and it lets
you scan objects in 3D, using an ordinary webcam and a simple hand-held laser
pointer. The idea is you place the object to be scanned in the corner of a
room, or between two flat surfaces at right angles to one another, point the
webcam at it then ‘brush’ the surfaces with your laser pointer. As you do so
the PC calculates the 3D coordinates and builds up a 3D model; software to
create a complete 360 degree image is now being developed, however, the lively
forum on the site has several suggestions as to how this could be accomplished
using a ‘Lazy Susan’ turntable. It’s all very cutting edge and perfect for
dabblers, who enjoy finding interesting new applications for their PCs.
02/03/07
Compact Multi Format Media Player
Media players have got completely out of hand. There are so
many different audio and video formats these days it sometimes seems you need
at least half a dozen different programs to play them all. Windows Media Player
does a fair job but it’s pretty intrusive, WinAmp is worth having too, if you
have good eyesight and don’t mind fiddling around but what you really want is a
media player that’s small, easy to use and plays just about everything,
including popular streaming formats.
Say hello to VLC
Media Player, a free Open Source player. The list of compatible formats and
codecs it supports is a long one but it includes most flavours of MPEG (1, 2,
DVD, VCD, SVCD etc.) Audio CD, AVI,
ASF, WMV, WMA, MP3, MP4, MOV, 3GP, OGG, WAV, FLAC, FLV, DivX, XviD, Cinepac,
MJPEG, Indeo, Real Audio (partial), and so on. It’s not much to look at but it
does the job, and at only 9Mb or thereabouts it’s small enough to fit on a pen
drive or memory-strapped laptop. It’s multi platform with versions available
for Windows, Mac and many types of Linux
12/02/07
Snippy
Snatcher Web Page Catcher
Let’s
suppose that you see something on a web page that you just know a
friend/relative/colleague will be interested in, so what do you do. You have
several choices; you can email the page address or a link, or how about this,
with just a single mouse click ‘grab’ the item and send it to the Windows
Clipboard. All you have to do now is open an email message window, paste the
item and send the message. It’s that easy with a little freeware utility called
Snippy. It waits patiently in
your System Tray until needed and when you see something you want just click on
the icon and make your selection.
05/01/07
Video DVD Maker Free
Creating a DVD from your home movies normally involves several some
fairly expensive software and a lot of faffing around but here’s a freebie
application that does it all for you, in just three clicks. What’s more Video DVD
Maker Free can handle video and clips in most popular formats, including
AVI, DIVX, XVID, MP4, MPG, WMV, ASF and MOV and it will burn to just about any
recordable media : CD R/RW, DVD+R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD DL, Video CD, Super Video
CD. It’s fairly basic, there are no editing facilities as such so what you
record is what you get but if all you want is to see your video on the big
screen then it really doesn’t get any easier and quicker than this.
01/12/06
Photobie
Freebie PhotoShop Clone
Okay so it’s not really a Photoshop clone but Photobie has to be one of the
most well-specified image editing programs you can get your mitts on, without
flashing the plastic! It’s Open Source freeware and users are encouraged to
help improve the program, and they have! It can do just about everything its
over-the-counter-cousins can do, including using a Layer manager for advanced
editing. There’s a very useful assortment of painting tools and it supports
PhotoShop filter plugins. For more mundane day to day use it has a handy screen
capture tool, gif animation utility, photo framing options, image directory
browser, plus lots of useful extras like batch resize and rotate and slide
show. Definitely worth a try!
17/11/06
Smarter Paint
Windows Paint is usually the first
and sometimes the only graphics program many PC owners ever use and to be fair
it does the job, but it is incredibly basic and really not much use for
anything other than very simple editing. Well if you like Paint but you hanker
after something a bit more sophisticated then have a look at a free Open Source
picture editor called Paint.net.
All of the familiar elements from Paint are there but it adds a whole load of
new features, including a very good assortment of special effects, it supports
layers, and if you get it wrong there’s an unlimited undo facility. It could be
the only picture editor you’ll ever need.
27/10/06
Desktop Snapper
Here’s an interesting little
utility. It’s called TimeSnapper and
it takes a snapshot of your desktop at preset intervals, from once a second to
every few minutes or hours.
The obvious question is why would you want to do
such a thing? Well, how about creating an animated graphic tutorial? You can
set the snap interval down to once a second, so you can show all of the steps in a given procedure simply by
recording your actions. Maybe you are suspicious that someone is using your PC
without your permission? TimeSnapper will gather the evidence for you.
How
about keeping an eye on what junior is up to? You shouldn’t use it to spy on
people but if you are concerned about the web sites your kids may be visiting
then TimeSnapper, set at 60-second intervals, will keep an eye on what they are
doing. Better yet, tell them you’ve installed it on their PC and hopefully they
won’t go looking for trouble. It comes with a built-in browser for replaying
images, which are time-stamped and there’s a simple to use timeline navigation
bar, so you can quickly find what you are looking for.
18/10/06
Headers and Footers on Printed Web
Pages
If you print web pages then you may
be irritated by all the extra guff that appears at the top and bottom of the
page -- web page address, page number, time and date and so on. There’s so much
of it you can end up with your printer spitting out extra sheets if the web
page won’t fit on the paper.
If you are using Firefox it’s easy
to put a stop to this wasteful practice, just go to File > Page Setup,
select the Margins & Header/Footer tab and under Headers & Footers at
the bottom use the drop-downs to add or remove information. In other words if
you want nothing set them all to ‘Blank’.
In Internet Explorer go to File
> Page Setup and in the Header and Footer boxes you’ll see a couple of lines
of gobbledegook. These are codes that determine what IE prints, so if you want
blank space at the top and bottom of the page zap the lot. For the record, or
if you want to retain or modify the information here’s what the codes mean:
&u (URL, web page address), &d (short format date), &D (long date
format), &t (time 12hr format) &T (time 24hr format), &w (window
title), &p (page number) &P (total number of pages) &b(centre
text), &b&b (right justify text).
17/10/06
Photo Retouching Freeware
You’ve probably got at least one
photo editing program on your PC but here’s one you should definitely try. It’s
called PhotoFiltre and from that you
may rightly assume it’s French in origin, but don’t let that put you off, an
English language version is available. What makes PhotoFiltre different is the
superb range of adjustments, filters, touch-ups and effects, which are all
instantly accessible from the desktop -- no messing around with menus -- and
how easy it is to use. Give it a whirl, you will be impressed!
12/10/06
SECOND
PRINTER INSTALL FOR WEB PAGES
This
tip is actually an extension of one we published a while back, namely
installing your printer twice, to trick Windows into thinking you have two
separate printers. The ‘second’ printer can then be configured for a specific
job, in this case black and white printing web pages. The reason you would want
to do that is simple, colour printing costs between 10 and 20 times as much as
black and white, and when all you want is the text content of a web page, why
pay, and wait, for all of the fancy graphics and backgrounds?
To
add a second printer in XP go to Start > Control Panel > Printers &
Faxes, click the Add a Printer link or right click into the right hand pane and
select Add A Printer then follow the prompts, giving your second printer
installation a suitably recognisable name. Now you can go into the second
printer’s Properties, by right-clicking on the icon, and on the Preferences
menu set it up to print only in Black and White. When you want to print a web
page simply go to Print on the File menu and select your Black and White
printer install from the drop-down menu.
12/06/06
STOP SCANNER CURL
If you’ve got a scanner I'm willing to bet that you have had trouble keeping curly photos
and documents with a fold or crease flat on the glass and aligned with the
edges. When you make the scan the image is usually off-bonk so you have to waste time smoothing it out and lining it up again. Here’s a quick and
simple tip to keep your material flat and square and that’s to keep it in
place with a thin sheet of glass from a photo frame. Keep it by your scanner;
you’ll wonder how you ever got on without it.
THINK PRINT
If your inkjet
printer sits idle for more than a week or two at a time then you run a very
real risk of the cartridge or print head drying out or clogging, particularly
in warm weather or if it’s used in an office with a dry atmosphere. When that
happens the cartridge could become unusable, even after cleaning and on some
models, with a separate print head, the printer could be permanently ruined. This
is easily avoided, just remember to print at least one document every couple of
weeks, a web page or the Test Document in your printer’s Properties box (right
click the printer icon) are as good as anything but make sure there’s some
colour content to keep the colour inks flowing freely.
PRINTER TROUBLE SHOOTER
Having problems with your
printer? You may be surprised to know
Windows 95 comes with a sophisticated printer troubleshooting program. It's on
the CD-ROM, you can find it with Windows Explorer, click on the D: drive icon,
then open the Other folder and inside you'll find a folder called Misc, open
that and then the Epts (enhanced printer troubleshooter). Click on epts.exe and
the program starts, first analysing your printer set-up, it then asks a series
of questions and suggests remedies to help you solve the problem. The
troubleshooter is built into Windows 98, just open Windows Help and type
Troubleshooting into the Index Windows and select Printers from the list.
IN A JAM
If you have a paper jam do
not force it. Always try to remove the blockage in the normal direction of
travel, if it tears make sure all of the fragments are removed. If you can't
clear the paper path refer to the manual. Store paper flat in the original
packaging, always fan it before loading t |