photos

Photoshop Elements 7 preview: A little whiz, mostly gee

With the latest versions of Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements, Adobe's laying on the Web subscription message really thick. Take, for instance, the Welcome screen, which is your first encounter with either one of the applications. The standard Organize, Edit, Create, and Share options get relegated to a task bar that's relatively inconspicuous compared with the large, rotating slide show heralding the many benefits of the free and $49.99 Plus memberships for Photoshop.com (more project templates, remote backup, and 20GB-plus of storage space). Adobe might as well have sold the space as an ad; it's that annoying. (For more on the online and mobile aspects of the Elements release, read our coverage on Download.com.) And that's too bad, because Photoshop Elements remains a very nice midrange photo editor, but all of these bells and whistles--some pretty off-key--increasingly detract from its core strengths.

The program's main advantage is that it's cheaper than Photoshop and Lightroom, but remains powerful enough for most photo retouching tasks. Thus, the improved raw workflow is quite welcome--improved, in that you can bypass it entirely if you want. For example, to create a slide show of NEF (Nikon raw) files, it simply applies the default raw-processing settings and treats them like JPEGs.

Also quite useful is the new text search box in the organizer, which is a fast, easy way to filter by keywords or basic metadata. Very basic metadata; you can only search on time, data, camera, and caption text. But that should be sufficient for this class of user.… Read more

Get creative with Epson's new design-savvy printers

Last week we showed you Epson's newest line of WorkForce printers, and this week Epson is back with another announcement: an "Artisan" series developed with the creative designer in mind. Unlike the WorkForce Series, the Artisan 700 and 800 are perfect for both household consumers and entrepreneurs that want a do-it-all printer that can perform multiple functions.

The Artisan 800 ($300) is the flagship model of the series with a comprehensive list of functions that include Wi-Fi, fax machine, copier with an Automatic Document Feeder, PictBridge support, and a dual paper tray to separate plain and photo-specific … Read more

Picnik adds support for layering, mass uploading

Picnik has just rolled out some neat new features for casual enthusiasts of photo editing.

Now found on the bottom of the editing environment is something called a "photo basket," which includes a pool of photos garnered from cloud services like Facebook, Flickr, and Photobucket, as well as uploads from users' hard drives. It also doubles as the new multiphoto uploader for those looking to unload the entirety of their memory card.

Switching between your photo sources in the basket is nearly instantaneous, and more importantly, it doesn't take you away from what you're working on. … Read more

Kodak announces cheap new digital photo frame

Kodak just announced a new entry-level model in its Easyshare P-Series line of digital photo frames. The news here is that at $79.95 the P520 is pretty inexpensive. But as one might expect from a sub $80 frame, it's on the small side at 5 inches.

This model, like the 7-inch P720 has touch-sensitive buttons on the border of the frame. The press release says, "With the touch sensitive Quick Touch Border, and with its unique scrolling feature, you can easily navigate through your images by simply sliding your finger across the frame border." Sexy stuff. … Read more

Three free alternatives to pricey graphics software

Why spend big bucks on graphics software when you can get many, if not most, of the same features from freeware? Here are three mui-expensive graphics apps and their free counterparts:

Adobe Illustrator Available for Windows only, Creative Docs .NET (yeah, weird name) is a vector-based graphic design tool for creating illustrations, manuals, flow charts, icons, and the like. It offers advanced features like Bezier curves, styles, convert-to-curves, and curved-path text. Adobe Photoshop You've actually got two choices here: GIMP, which is available for all platforms, and Paint.NET, which is Windows-only. Both programs offer powerful, Photoshop-caliber image-editing tools, … Read more

New Review: Photo to Movie (Mac)

Do you want a simple way to bring life to your photos? Photo to Movie is a fairly basic concept which adds drama to average photographs. Once you have your chosen photo, use the intuitive tool set to choose your starting and ending frames to create a camera path across the image. The end result is a slow motion pan across a photograph or several photographs, making for excellent slide shows with extremely smooth animations. You can even add music to make it more dramatic. If you're looking for a way to make a photo DVD, a personalized screensaver, … Read more

Photobucket, Scrapblog form crafty partnership

Photobucket, the massive photo-sharing site that was acquired by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last year, has partnered with Scrapblog, a start-up that lets members create online scrapbooks.

Through the partnership, whose financial terms were not disclosed, Scrapblog's drag-and-drop application will be available within Photobucket so that users can work their Photobucket albums into scrapbooks and then share or embed them on the Web. Starting in September, printed versions of Scrapblog scrapbooks will be available for purchase.

"Scrapbooks have traditionally been an important part of how people have kept and shared memories offline for many years, and … Read more

Microsoft launches 3D wonder Photosynth for consumers

Photosynth, a technology demo from Microsoft Live Labs, has graduated from its "ooh, that's pretty" status to being a viable Web service for consumers.

The technology, which takes a grouping of photographs and stitches them into a faux 3D environment, can now be implemented with photos you've taken on your digital camera or mobile phone, and converted right on your computer. Previously, the process of stitching these photos together took weeks of processing on specially configured server arrays. With its latest version, Microsoft has managed to shrink that into around the time it takes to upload … Read more

Flickr's slideshows get cinematic, viral

It only took Flickr four months to get around to it, but user-created videos now sit alongside photos as part of the widely-used slideshow tool.

Previously videos, which are still a beta feature for paying pro members, resided in their own island. If you were putting together a special set for a slideshow, you'd have to open up the videos separately. That problem no longer exists--much to the bemusement of vacation photo and video enthusiasts.

Flickr has also increased the presence of slideshows around the site, including where you can fire one up. This is most noticeable on search … Read more