Windows only: If you need to crop a lot of JPEG images in a hurry, JPEGCrops is an invaluable freeware tool. Almost every image program offers the ability to crop images, resize them, and oftentimes do both in bulk. JPEGCrops stands out by allowing you to set the crop for each picture using a thumbnail system. Then, once you have set your specific crop for each photo it will batch crop and resize a set of image files. The cropping is lossless as JPEGCrops crops without repacking the file but instead discarding the data that is cut away without re-compression. JPEGCrops offers a host of preset file sizes you can crop to such as standard print and screen sizes.

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The Ask VG blog points us to a dark blue, modern-looking "Embedded" theme for Windows XP, designed and signed by Microsoft. That means no file hacking—just install the package and switch your theme in your desktop preferences. Here are two direct download links. To use other, non-signed themes, check out our guide to using custom visual styles in XP and Vista. [via]

Weblog TUAW posts a detailed step-by-step tutorial for using Photoshop's Lens Blur tool to clip objects from one photograph to another. In the example, the author moves an open book from a plain white background to a wood floor, and though the lighting is a little conspicuous, the results are still impressive. The guide is also packed with helpful screenshots, which makes any good Photoshop tutorial stand out. Check out how to blend layers in Photoshop with displacement for a similarly cool effect, or try TUAW's other guide to simulating a tilt-shift lens with the Lens Blur tool.

Windows only: Instant Eyedropper is a simple system tray tool that can identify the colour of any pixel on screen -- a useful trick if you're designing a web site or performing other graphics-related tasks. Just drag the tray icon to the part of the screen whose colour you want to copy, and release. Instant Eyedropper copies the colour code for that pixel onto your clipboard (you can choose from a range of formats), ready for use in your HTML editor or graphics program. This is a simple one-task tool, but if you're trying to experiment with different colour schemes it could save you a lot of hassle. Instant Eyedropper is a free download for Windows users. Thanks Chris A!

Windows only: Free, open-source application WebWallpaper loads images from any URL or desktop location and swaps out your desktop background on a schedule. Originally designed for use with webcams, the application works with any image URL you point it to. WebWallpaper comes with a few webcam URLs baked in with beautiful streaming images, so it's easy to get up and running with live-updating backgrounds. If you know of a high-resolution webcam in your area that streams to a static URL, this app is potentially very cool—your desktop becomes a window looking outside, updating your wallpaper with the current conditions automatically. If WebWallpaper isn't quite what you're looking for, check out previously mentioned John's Background Switcher—which integrates with popular photo webapps like Flickr, Picasa, and even Facebook—or the recently released Wallpapers from MSN.

The Photojojo photography site parcels out 10 tips for looking good in portraits, whether you're setting the timer and running or handing over your rig to another shooter. Along with choosing the right time of day (morning or late afternoon) and a vibrant background, the site recommends a trick I've heard from many news photographers taking portraits:

Ask the photographer to count to three before taking the picture. Close your eyes and breathe in. Then, just before the shutter clicks, breathe out, open your eyes and smile. Your face will look relaxed and your smile will be real.

Simple, but effective. Got your own shutter secrets for better portraits? Spill 'em in the comments. Photo by !!!! scogle.

Windows only: The free Emerge Alternative Desktop Shell replaces Windows' taskbar, Start menu, and right-click context menu with a super-minimalistic version. In short, Emerge leaves you with essentially an empty desktop, a clean slate for some killer customisations. Emerge also clears away icons and menus Launchy users don't need. When you first install Emerge, you may feel a bit out of sorts—where do you click when there's no Start menu? Right click on your desktop to get access to your Start menu programs and quick launch toolbar and Emerge's settings. Ctrl+Click on the Emerge Tray (upper left hand corner on your desktop by default), to further customise the look and feel of the tray. The learning curve on Emerge isn't flat, but poking through the documentation and trying out various settings will make the dedicated desktop customiser very happy. Emerge is a free download for Windows only. Got another Windows shell replacement you like better than Emerge? Post it in the comments.

Windows/Linux: Picasa, Google's photo management tool, has quietly announced a new beta that adds basic movie editing, fuller syncing to Web Albums, and many other features and changes. Actually, the biggest change in the new Picasa isn't in the software itself—it's a new "quick view" utility, which replaces the basic double-click viewing tool in Windows with a Picasa-friendly, drop-cloth-style window. Five new collage styles have also been added to the offerings, and Picasa's new "Movie Maker" tool lets you create slideshow-style clips out of stills or trim and paste video clips together. Check out Picasa's help section for more details on what's new and what's changed, or read on for a peek at some screenshots from the new release.

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Taking any kind of photo at night isn't easy, but especially when you're camera's pointed towards the heavens. When you want to start capturing your star-gazing on film (or, er, memory card), check out Wired's How-To Wiki's guide to photographing the stars. Photo by DJMcCrady.

Last month Adam showed you six Firefox extensions that enable Chrome's best features, but today reader Asian Angel takes it a few steps further and creates an almost identical-looking Chrome clone using 10 Firefox extensions and one theme. The result is an amazing close reproduction of Chrome's look and behaviour. Take a look at the before and after photos, then get the extension and theme list Asian Angel compiled.

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We're not exactly clear on why there's a panda on Flickr puking a rainbow of photos, but there it is, an unusual way to see the best images on the photo-sharing site. Click on a photo quick before it disappears to see its Flickr page. [via Waxy]

While fiddling with the look and feel of your computer desktop isn't technically productive, making your workspace something you're proud of and happy to look at makes you more likely to want to get things done. Earlier this week, Jason showed you how to start using custom Windows visual styles, and the comments blew up with readers recommending their favourite desktop themes. In addition to the three themes Jason pointed out in his article, let's take a look at a few more reader recommendations your desktop might like to try on for size.

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Windows/Mac/Linux (all platforms): GIMP, the free, open-source graphics editor, has come out with a 2.6 version, and it's put some significant changes into the editor's interface and back-end operations. New to this version are support for 32 bits per colour channel and a new GEGL-based backend (turned on and off in the preferences), polygonal and sectional selection with the Free Select Tool, better handling of windows, toolbars, docked tools, and menus, and a "brush dynamics" sub-menu that gives creators serious control over their pixel-pushing tools. Those are just a few of the many changes in this release. GIMP 2.6 is a free download for Windows, Mac, or Linux platforms, though it's only (officially) available as source code at the moment. Read on for help installing GIMP 2.6 on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

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Earlier this week, Jason de-mystified the process of styling your Windows system with custom themes, along with the tweaks needed to pull it off. Those Windows Vista users who just can't commit to patching, finding and copying themes, however, might find comfort in Vista Visual Master, a free, all-in-one tool for opening up your Vista system to themes, downloading and installing them, and tweaking tons of other graphical elements, including icons, your log-on picture, boot screen, and more. Read on for a peek at how Vista Visual Master can mold your system to your liking and make theming easy.

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All platforms with Firefox: The WiseStamp beta Firefox add-on edits, saves, and applies rich HTML signatures to your web-based email accounts, including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and AOL mail. With WiseStamp installed, you get a rich HTML editor that lets you create signatures with links, colours, images, and formatting, plus links to your favourite social network profiles. You can make more than one signature, too—like personal and business. Once you're in your webmail account, WiseStamp adds a signature drop-down so you can choose which sig to use with the current email, or it can insert it automatically. Take a look at some screenshots of WiseStamp in action.

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Windows only: Freeware application Wallpapers from MSN adds several customisation and management options to your desktop wallpaper. When you first install Wallpapers, it downloads around 125 high quality wallpapers from Microsoft to get you started, but you aren't limited to those images by any means—you can add any of your own wallpapers to the application any time you want. Once you choose a wallpaper, you can use the app's simple editing tools to crop, rotate, resize, and add text, speech bubbles, or foreground images to the wallpaper. Probably its best feature, Wallpapers can rotate your wallpaper as a slideshow or by time of day. Wallpapers is freeware, Windows only.

Customising the appearance of your Windows installation can be frustrating, because both Windows XP and Vista are limited to the Microsoft's default themes out of the box. However, with a bit of tweaking under the hood, your Windows setup can try on a wider range of looks than come pre-installed. Let's take a look at how to patch your Windows installation to allow customised styles, and a few places to find new and interesting styles online.

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Mac OS X only: Today Google releases Top Draw, a nifty image generation application that rotates its creations on your desktop. Top Draw uses scripts to create colorful psychedelic images, and sets them as your desktop wallpaper with an option to automatically refresh at an interval you set. A Google Mac developer writes:

The Top Draw scripting language leverages Apple's Quartz and CoreImage rendering engines for graphical muscle. In addition to the drawing commands that are supported by the HTML canvas tag, there is support for particle systems, plasma clouds, random noise, multi-layer compositing and much more.

After just a few minutes, Top Draw's given me some beautiful images. Top Draw is a free download for Mac only.

Wikipedia lovers, you can get a random page from the 'pedia to just show up automatically on your PC with the Wikipedia Screen Saver. Sometimes you get pretty empty pages in need of work, other times you learn something pithy and new without lifting a finger. Choose Wikipedia from the screen saver drop-down in Display Properties after you install it. [via Ghacks]

Windows only: Microsofts' Image Composite Editor is a free application for stitching several pictures together into one panoramic photograph. We've already shown you how to stitch photos into panoramas with free software or with Photoshop's Photomerge tool, but the dedicated Image Composite Editor won't cost you a dime, is dead simple to use, and works really well. I tested its chops with a quick panorama of my (messy) desk, and it stitched everything together quickly, with no effort on my part. For a one-off tool with very specific goals, Microsoft's done this one right. The Image Composite Editor is freeware, Windows only, requires .NET 2.0.

Windows only: Microsoft Pro Photo Tools is a full-featured metadata editor for your digital photographs. The app supports pictures saved in RAW format along with JPEG and TIFF, and editing your metadata works the same no matter what your default file type is. Apart from extensive run of the mill metadata editing, Microsoft Pro Photo Tools' marquee feature is geotagging, which can add location information to your photos in a number of ways. Once geotagged, you can view any of your images on a Windows Live map. Microsoft Pro Photo Tools is freeware, requires .NET 3.0 and Windows validation (blech). If you've already got a favourite metadata editor for your photos, let's hear about it in the comments.

Funny Photoshopper Donnie Hoyle demonstrates how to use the Photoshop's Photomerge tool to quickly and easily stitch several related photographs into one. In the example, Hoyle merges related screenshots of a map together, but Photomerge is probably most often used for is creating panoramas from multiple photographs. As you can see in the video, Photomerge makes creating one large image from several smaller images a piece of cake: Just plug in your pictures and let Photoshop do the legwork for you. You can also use Photomerge to create collages or pull together a quick side-by-side shot, so you're not limited to creating panoramas with it. Then again, if you prefer the freeware route, check out how to stitch photos into panoramas with free software.

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Windows only: Australian company ExitReality has been garnering lots of coverage this week with its self-titled 3D plug-in, which claims to turn any web page into a 3D environment. Exit Reality isn't the only company to have attempted a 3D online universe -- Google's Lively is the most prominent recent example -- and in its current incarnation, it needs some tweaking to really become a contender. The install process is a little clunky, and with ExitReality running, I found that Firefox didn't want to launch any other new windows. Site conversion is a fairly slow process, and doesn't necessarily produce meaningful results (I certainly wouldn't want to navigate Lifehacker using it). Sites with specifically built ExitReality environments such as Facebook were more coherent, but still harder to manipulate in 3D mode than normally. The navigation controls all worked as expected, but once the novelty of seeing sites broken into component pieces wore off, I was itching to get back to the 2D web. ExitReality is a free download for Windows systems only.

Are you a Linux lover with a not-so-secret need for Photoshop and its many, many filters? Check out the newly-revived User Filter plug-in, which, combined with download-able filters, makes the free, open-source editor quite a bit more useful. [via]

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While for casual snaps (and web sharing) almost any camera with a resolution of 1MP or more will do, if you're serious about getting printed output from your camera that's bigger than a standard shot, you need to make sure you have enough megapixels for the task. Megapixel Calculator helps map the often confusing relationship between image size and camera resolution, and has other handy reference charts like how many images in various formats you can fit on a typical memory card -- great for when photo mathematics has your brain fried.