Tag: photo

  • Giveaway: Picture Collage Maker Pro With Christmas Pack

    Giveaway: Picture Collage Maker Pro With Christmas Pack

    Earlier RGdot.com brought you two chances to win Picture Collage Maker Pro, once by itself and another with a thanksgiving pack. Now PearlMountain Technology Co. are back with another giveaway and extra offer. This time Picture Collage Maker Pro is ready with a Christmas pack.

    Picture Collage Maker Pro Christmas Pack
    Follow the download links to get Picture Collage Maker Pro or if you have Picture Collage Maker Pro installed click the Download More Templates button (see image). Alternatively go straight to http://picturecollagesoftware.com/resources/christmas-pack.html to download the all new Christmas pack.

    Run the .exe and (re-)open the program. You will have 26 additional Christmas templates.

    Comment below to win a copy of Picture Collage Maker Pro and the Christmas pack. Happy Holidays!

  • Freeware Shorts: RealWorld Paint (Image Editor)

    Freeware Shorts: RealWorld Paint (Image Editor)

    Over two years ago I reviewed RealWorld Paint.COM and was impressed. Recently the author released a major update (Version: 2011.1) with a slightly changed name (RealWorld Paint). Once again he sought advice at the DonationCoder forums as well.

    This new version has several new features, some of which are listed below that make RealWorld Paint even better and probably even more complete that is required for most users.

    RealWorld Paint

    The features are: Support layers with styles (individual layers can be filtered with the likes of blur, rotate and more and even worked on with Photoshop tools. This is followed naturally by Photoshop (.psd) format support and a few other formats too. More tools are added that include lasso and liquify. Additional command line support is explained here. An interesting animation tool (Create—>Create Animation) is also new which splits an image into rows and columns which then creates a sort of filmstrip animation with the divided parts of the image.

    RealWorld Paint is available in a portable format as well.

  • Freeware Shorts: Kestrel GX (Photo Editor And Organizer)

    Freeware Shorts: Kestrel GX (Photo Editor And Organizer)

    Kestrel GX (Version: 1.2.1 as of this post) is an attractive photo editor that also helps organize photos into one or more databases. It supports many image formats including JPG and others but also Photoshop’s PSD format and RAW formats. Photos can be arranged into PDF albums to share easily with others. The usual edits like resize, rotate, flip, convert, remove red eye, saturation, rename and others are available but Kestrel GX lets you choose an external application (File —> Open In External Editor) for editing images.

    Kestrel GX

    Kestrel GX is perhaps mostly useful as a photo organizer. Not only it can be used to edit and search EXIF, IPTC and even GPS data associated with images but it can also be used divide images by rating, category and keywords and store them into their own database(s) managed by the program to view and also search for later.

    Kestrel GX has print capability that includes a few ways or templates to print and also a slideshow (View —> Slideshow) with 163 transition effects. To top it all of it does both image and text watermarks (File —> Watermark Images) too. Kestrel GX is one of the most complete photo applications out there and is free for personal and educational use only. It requires Windows XP and up.

  • CollageIt Review And Giveaway

    CollageIt Review And Giveaway

    Comment below for your chance to win a CollageIt license from Pearl Mountain Software!

    CollageIt is another very easy method to create image or photo collages. CollageIt provides templates to create a virtually unlimited number of image or photo collages.

    CollageIt

    When first opened CollageIt provides 15 general templates. These spread or distribute images in somewhat different and random ways. After choosing one of the templates the main program interface opens where photos from one or several locations can be added. If you need to you can choose a different template from the bottom left corner.

    The Page Setup button lets you pick a page size. Desktop wallpaper, A4, scrapbook and envelope are just a few of the available sizes. DPI (dots per inch) and orientation are also options here.

    The Background button lets you choose a gradient or background image that will lie behind and around the collage. Image opacity and fill are also options here.

    The Random Layout and Shuffle buttons just add a bit of variation to the collage as do options like Rotation and Auto Sparse. It is fun to play with these and see the result with the Realtime Preview option.

    The Layout and Photo tabs to the right add even more customization options that include changing the spacing or margin or adding borders or frames to each individual photo. A rather limited black shadow – to the whole collage area – option is also available.

    The crop button (under the collage preview) also works to cut individual images. Just click on one image inside the collage preview and then press the Crop button and play with your collage.

    CollageIt works on Windows 2000 and newer versions and is also available for the Mac. The licensed version removes the CollageIt watermark and adds the aforementioned crop option.

     

  • Picture Collage Maker Pro Review And Giveaway

    Picture Collage Maker Pro Review And Giveaway

    Comment below for your chance to win Picture Collage Maker Pro from PearlMountainSoft!

    Picture Collage Maker Pro is a fun and useful program from Pearl Mountain Software. With it you can create collages of pictures just to keep as images or as scrapbooks and you may also create greeting cards, desktop wallpapers and calendars.

    Picture Collage Maker Pro

    Upon start up Picture Collage Maker Pro offers four choices on how to proceed. The first method is to start a blank collage. Here one can choose different sizes of paper, greeting cards, desktop wallpaper or simply a custom size. The second option is a template wizard, in this case photos are added and then one of the pre-made layouts (greeting cards, collages, etc.) are chosen. The third option is to create from template, this is essentially the same as the second option but the user will see the layouts first and then add photos. The fourth and last option is the grid collage wizard which lets the user divide a page into equal size grids and then include images in a rectangular grid.

    Once in the program Picture Collage Maker Pro supports drag and drop to add images. Images can then be aligned, resized and rotated. Additionally one may choose a background and it is also possible to add masks, frames, clipart and shapes. All in all Picture Collage Maker Pro is a complete program and it is easy to use (see image for a sample I created in seconds) and comes complete with built-in print capability.

  • 5DFly Free Photo Editing And Viewer

    5DFly Free Photo Editing And Viewer

    5Dfly Free Photo Editing And Viewer

    5DFly is a freeware image viewer with a set of basic and few extra and useful features. It loads single images (after double clicking them) into a tabbed interface making working with several images easier. It supports creation of slideshows in powerpoint (*.ppt and *.pps) formats. 5DFly also has built-in support for uploading pictures to Flickr and Facebook.

    5DFly can convert an HTML page to an image. Here the user enters an URL which the program fetches to an internal viewer and generates an image from. This, in effect, is an alternative method for grabbing web page screenshots, one which grabs whole pages all the way to the bottom without the need to scroll down for longer pages.

    The more readily available elsewhere features of 5DFly are batch processing for resizing photos and others like converting to gray scale, cropping freely or to predefined sizes, rotating, removing red eye and others.

    Of further note are the history features available in the individual image view which lets the user undo any operations done on the image and also a web page history to keep tab on sites visited (for the *.html to *.jpg operation for example) using the program. Copying images to the clipboard and setting them as wallpaper are also possible with 5DFly.

    Upon installation 5DFly associates itself with *.jpg and other image formats without prompting the user for input and it sports a Mac-like theme or skin. These two shortcomings will not be held against it today however!

    5DFly runs on Windows 2000 and newer versions.

  • JetPhoto Lets You Manage Your Images

    JetPhoto Lets You Manage Your Images

    JetPhoto Studio is described by its author as

    JetPhoto Studio is a feature-rich and easy-to-use digital photo software

    With JetPhoto it is possible to organize photos into albums, and to archive and back them up as well. One can browse collections or albums in the usual thumbnail mode where not only it is also possible to add notes or tags to individual images or collections of images but it is also possible to star or favorite selected ones, view them by date either utilizing the file creation/modification information or EXIF details. Double clicking on individual photos takes the user to an (almost) full screen mode with some of the expected effects and tools included. Images can be made into a wallpaper or a screensaver, sepia effect can be added, the image can be cropped and watermark added just to mention a few.


    JetPhoto

    One of the negatives of the concept of JetPhoto is that when it creates its albums it actually copies or replicates the photos. Perhaps it is possible to choose the album location (prompted when first creating it) to be in the same, originating folder that your images reside in but I did not test that possibility. Another unexpected behaviour or bug is that the magnifier did not always work in my usage, the icon did change to a magnifying glass one when the image was loaded into the full screen mode but actions -clicking and holding the mouse- had very little or no effect on the portion of the image the focus was on and even then that depended on the actual image size. A look at the program’s features pages explains

    You can place your mouse pointer on an interesting part of a photo, press and hold the mouse button to reveal a magnifier which magnifies the image with actual pixels at full size of the original photo.

    so perhaps this is not actually a full blown magnifier in the true sense of the word or is it?

    JetPhoto makes it easy to search an album or across albums and besides the normal search criteria there are possibilities of searching photos by location if the photos have that info attached to them. To do that JetPhoto can connect to a map server to allow the geotagging of photos or to connect to google maps and generate KML or KMZ files for use with Google Earth.

    JetPhoto adds a few attractive output options (see image) but some are either crippled by bearing the JetPhoto text in one frame (in the web flash gallery for example) and/or limits on the number of times they can be used to create an output. A PhotoJet server can be setup to store images online on any webspace using the program itself as a management interface. This is available as a sort of alternative to flickr, which the program itself also supports. JetPhoto runs on Windows 2000, Windows XP and Vista. A Mac OS X version is also available.