Windows only: If you’re going to create a photo mosaic, you might as well invest the time to do it well. Foto-Mosaik-Edda is a powerful tool for creating impressive, detailed, finely-tuned photo mosaics.
Windows only: First Impression is free and minimal image viewer with a focus on maximising the space used for viewing your images by doing away with command bars and buttons.
Windows only: LightBox is an extremely user friendly tool for editing photos when you need more than a simple crop and resize but less than a full-out Photoshop massaging.
Repper is a fun and easy-to-use web site that turns photographs into abstract patterns, suitable for tiled-style wallpaper on your computer or web site.
Photovisi is a surprisingly sophisticated collage maker with an assortment of options for tweaking your collage to your liking. Photovisi has eighteen collage templates for groupings of pictures ranging from only a couple up to 30 pictures. Once you select the pictures you can shuffle their order and crop them. On templates where there is some order to the photos, like a ring around primary photo as seen in the screenshot here, Photovisi lets you select which one will be the focus. You can bulk upload images from your computer or pull photos from Flickr. Photovisi [via MakeUseOf]
You have a camera and a willing subject, but you’re not sure how to break your portraits out of the flat blandness that plagues many snapshots. Over at the photography site Digital Photography School, they’ve put together a list of best practices for avoiding the boring portrait blues. They all focus on breaking out of your default camera-pointed-right-at-subject’s-face/subject-starring-down-camera-like-hungry-wolf setup. The photograph I grabbed from Flickr here (Photo by Kevin N. Murphy.) is an example of tip #7, introducing a prop into the photo. Another way to go about injecting interest into your photos is to take a well-established rule of composition and break it:
Windows only: PhotoPerfect Express is a free, powerful image optimization tool that covers a wide range of photo enhancement scenarios, and can provide casual photographers with great results. While nothing can compare to getting your hands dirty with a detailed photo editing application like Photoshop, the majority of casual digi-cam shooters won’t need or want to invest that kind of time into snazzing up their snap shots. PhotoPerfect Express comes bundled with five pre-set photo enhancement methods—each of which can be further fine-tuned if you desire. There’s batch processing options, especially handy if you realise after tweaking the first few photos in a series that you’re seeing the same issues throughout the set. If you’re having trouble deciding which optimization is yielding the most pleasing result, press the A key while tweaking to display the original next to all five optimization algorithms for easy comparison—a nice fix for those with photo-fixing self-doubt. PhotoPerfect Express is freeware, Windows only.
PhotoPerfect Express [via Life Rocks 2.0]What’s a bokeh you say? It’s that oh-so-wonderful fuzziness in the background of photographs with a shallow depth of field and accompanying starry highlights. You can create you own bokeh effects with a little craftiness. The term bokeh is an anglicised version of a Japanese word used to describe the portion of a photograph that is out of focus behind the area of principal focus in a picture. When you see a portrait that has a creamy soft background and a nice crisp focus on the person being photographed, you are seeing bokeh. The shape of the highlights—sometimes round, hexagonal or other geometric shapes—is determined by the shape of the aperture in the lens.
Collagr is a web based application that creates collages from photos uploaded to Flickr and Photobucket. You can use your own photos by plugging in the URL for the directory into Collagr or use search terms—the sample here was generate from a search for red roses. Once Collagr has grabbed images from the URL you supply, you can tinker with settings like the background colour, spacing between pictures, the resolution of the output, and you can apply a grayscale or inverted colour filter to the image. Collagr hosts the image once it is generate, you can either download it or use link to the unique URL that is generated. [via MakeUseOf]
Blogger Vinayaka CA details how he uses Google’s excellent photo management application Picasa to manage multiple photo libraries. His solution: Create a Picasa library under another user account (e.g., PicasaUser) on your Windows PC, then put a shortcut to Picasa on your main desktop. Whenever you want to use your alternate Picasa library, right-click the shortcut and select Run as ->PicasaUser. You’ll have to provide the other username and password every time you do it, and this isn’t as clean as if Picasa actually supported multiple libraries (like iPhoto and iTunes do), but it’s a good workaround if you want to separate your pics into multiple libraries. I gave it a try and it seemed to work, but if you’ve got a better method, let’s hear it in the comments.
How you can use picasa to maintain your p**n ? [Vinayaka's Blog]
