Tag: slideshow

  • Hornil Photo Viewer: New Lightweight Image Viewer

    Hornil Photo Viewer: New Lightweight Image Viewer

    Hornil Photo Viewer

    Hornil Photo Viewer (version: 1.0) is a new freeware for home use image viewer from the developer who brought us the very capable Hornil StylePix photoshop alternative.

    Hornil Photo Viewer is pretty much no frills and there are certainly many more better known alternatives available but it fills the need well enough for a basic image viewer. It features a file tree on the left, several ways to list or view images in the main section and a histogram, waveform, exif info (and the option to remove the info) and thumbnail viewer on the right.

    Other features included are full screen mode, view in slideshow, image zoom, flip, rotate and convert and a launcher for any external image editor. The familiar keyboard shortcuts are available too, for example Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDn to navigate through images. The supported formatted are png, jpg, tif, bmp, ico, jpc, pcx, tga, tif, ico, jpc, jp2, pcx, pgx, pnm, pgm, ppm, ras, ska, wmf and tsp. Hornil Photo Viewer runs on XP and newer.

  • Giveaway: Create Movies With Wondershare Fantashow

    Giveaway: Create Movies With Wondershare Fantashow

    The giveaway has now ended, thanks everyone. Winners will be emailed soon.

    Comment below to win a copy of Wondershare Fantashow for Windows worth $49.95!

    Wondershare Fantashow is a movie or slideshow maker, with it you use your own videos, pictures and sounds to create a movie. It takes three steps to have a movie or slideshow done, viewed or shared online.

    Wondershare Fantashow

    First up is the Theme tab, here a movie or video background is chosen, either from the included sample or one downloaded from within the program. Preview each theme by clicking play. Once one is chosen the Apply button brings up the theme to the next step ready to be used.

    The Create tab comes next. Add media, either image(s), video(s) or a combination of both. Reorder them by dragging them in the timeline section. Add Subtitles too. The use of subtitles is somewhat confusing in this case, the common meaning for subtitles is different than how they are used in Wondershare Fantashow. Subtitles refer to simple text here, for example adding a title between two segments of a movie. Click on the top right of any segment within the time line to add a text directly over a video or photo. When a photo is chosen in the timeline it can be edited – button to the right of the Add Subtitles one – to add effects to it. The available effects are Invert, Equalize, BWFilter, Glow, Soble, Canvas, VignetteWhite, SquareBlur, VideoWall, TVWall, Emboss, Cartoon, Cool, Warm, Hot, Brown, Purple, MirrorLR, MirrorTB, Distort, Enlarge, Narrow, Whirl, Snow and more. It is also possible to customize the background music and one can use either the default or any locally saved audio file.

    The next and final step is the Export tab. The options are to save locally in avi, mp4, wmv or mov formats in HD or standard resolutions or save to Youtube where the program prompts for login details, category, title, description, tags and if the video is private or personal or burn to DVD where the TV standard (NTSC or PAL), disk type (D5 or D9) and video quality are chosen. It is also possible to burn an image file. Finally Wondershare Fantashow supports saving to mobile devices including iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad and HTC and Galaxy phones as well.

    Supported input formats are for images bmp, jpg, png, gif, tif, ico, dib, jpeg, jpe, jfif and tiff, for videos mp4, flv, avi, vob, 3gp, asf, mov, f4v, mpg, dpg, ts, trp, m2ts, mts, dat, wmv, mkv, dvr-ms, dv, tod and evo and for audio mp3, aac, ac3, m4a, mp2, wav, ra, ram, ape, au, aiff, aif, ogg and flac. Wondershare Fantashow requires Windows XP and newer and there is a Mac version available as well.

  • Aimersoft DVD Creator Review And Giveaway

    Aimersoft DVD Creator Review And Giveaway

    Comment below to win a copy of Aimersoft DVD Creator for Windows worth $39.95!

    Aimersoft is an easy to use tool that makes the DVD burning process a simple one. The user can burn DVDs from downloaded or home movies or simply from photos – to create slideshows – or even a combination of photos and videos.

    Aimersoft DVD Creator

    The first step, the Source tab, is to import the media. Here as many videos or images that are needed can be imported. Aimersoft DVD Creator supports the AVI, MOV, MP4, M4V, FLV, VOB, WMV, MPEG, DV, 3GP, 3GP2, DAT, ASF, MOD, TOD and H.264/AVC formats. Use the Add Title button to burn separate movies onto a single DVD. Once the media is visible, hover over its title (in the menu structure section of the interface) and use the pencil button to trim it, enable subtitles for it, add watermarks to it, change its brightness, reduce its volume and more. All the while a preview of changes will be visible.

    The Menu tab features templates to use for creating the DVD menu, besides the few available by default other templates can be downloaded from the Aimersoft site using the Templates button on the upper right hand corner. This tab also includes options such as choosing either the 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratios, moving and editing text and other objects, adding text, adding background music, touching up photos and customizing the background itself. The background customization button opens a dialogue window that allows the user to choose a frame of any video or any image to display as the menu background.

    The Preview tab shows the final output before the actual DVD burning process is started. The available options are NTSC or PAL and disc playback mode. The latter allows the user to choose how the DVD starts by default. The final product does have a good professional look to it, especially since the menu is not static and, similar to many feature film DVDs, shows a few seconds of the movie itself.

    Aimersoft DVD Creator works on Windows versions going back to NT4, a Mac version is also available.

  • 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.

  • Hornil StylePix: Feature Packed And Freeware Photoshop Alternative

    Hornil StylePix: Feature Packed And Freeware Photoshop Alternative

    Hornil StylePix, Freeware Photoshop Alternative

    Hornil StylePix is an impressive Photoshop replacement that is not only freeware but is only 1.5MB in size. The layout is similar to that of the expensive Adobe product. Not unlike other free Photoshop alternatives it supports a lot of the features or functions of the much bigger product and does them reasonably well.

    Hornil StylePix’s features include the likes of lasso (free, polygonal and others and all with extra settings to increase, decrease, fill and generally work with the selected region), erase, spray and an easy way to draw shapes.

    Walking through the program menu, the following are also available.

    The file menu: Batch processing with control over output size, name, orientation and filter. Browsing, previewing and navigating folders from within the program. Setting images as wallpaper.

    The edit menu: The usual series of tools like brush, clone, fill, color drop, text, zoom, transform, fix red eye and others. Here is also where one can use Hornil StylePix’s support for multiple undo levels in addition to the histogram.

    The image menu: Rotate, resize, duplicate and crop.

    The object menu: ‘Inserting’ images into other images and working with them as groups and then aligning, blending and layering (the image shows two pictures ‘grouped’ together)

    The Filter menu features a list of filters including the likes of noise, sketch, glow, blur and others.

    The view menu : Grid, ruler, and zoom. Also full screen mode and slideshow for the current image’s folder. This is also where the program options reside where the slideshow, interface grid, program skin and other settings are configured.

    The Window menu arranges windows and preserves or saves the layout for future sessions.

    A pro version with layer styles such as emboss, shadow and glow is also available. Hornil StylePix runs on Windows XP and newer PCs.