cropping

Click 2 Crop provides users with a fast and easy way to resize any photo. While the primary action is fantastic, users may get overwhelmed with the special features--some necessary and some unnecessary.

The program's interface is initially very intuitive. Looking very similar to other photo-editing software, it should come natural to anyone with such experience. However, the wealth of command buttons along the top will require a quick trip to the Help file for definitions. Resizing a picture will feel instantly familiar to those who have seen and operated photo-editing software before. A box made from a dashed … Read more

Photo Manipulation software can be a lot of fun for digital picture fans. However, some of the programs can be overwhelming and confusing. BatchPhoto offers a unique twist that should help users change their snapshots in a hurry.

BatchPhoto presents itself as an easy-to-use, three-step wizard. The primary screen, and the first step, is dedicated to finding pictures you wish to alter. File paths are listed individually on a long central screen for all chosen pictures. The second step offers a simple way to apply changes to all the pictures selected. Here the first picture selected is shown in the … Read more

I'm allergic to tomatoes. Also black olives and mushrooms. That means I'm about the worst guy in the world to order a pizza with. But tomatoes are in about everything. Tacos, spaghetti--you name it, it's got tomatoes.

That is why I can't fully get behind these robotic, automated tomato-farming machines being developed by MIT. Clearly, they're Terminators sent from the future to try to kill me. Or Sarah Connor, though I'm not sure what she's allergic to.

I mean where else would something so high-tech come from? The robots are just part of … Read more

If you're looking for a full-featured image editor at a relatively low price, Pixelmator fills the bill nicely. Sporting a smooth Mac-friendly interface, Pixelmator offers a layout much like Adobe Photoshop with separate toolbars offering standard selector and paint brush type tools, a color-picker, a brush shape picker, and a layer manager. Also like Photoshop, Pixelmator comes with all the image manipulation tools you might need for adjusting color, saturation, brightness and contrast, and many more. If you want to add effects to your images, you can pick from several different common filters like distortion, blur, sharpen, halftone, and … Read more

For making color corrections, printing, managing photo albums, or any of 100 other routine image-editing tasks associated with digital photography, commercial programs like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Paint Shop Pro are great solutions. But if you just need to resize and crop your personalized South Park character image to fit on your Facebook or MySpace page, a simpler option is in order.

Luckily, there are a variety of free and easy ways to crop and resize your digital photographs. One of the quickest and easy downloads for doing so is IrfanView, a longtime favorite image viewer that has added more … Read more

Making simple crop edits to videos of all formats shouldn't be tricky business, but most tools out there either do way too much or are so belabored with ads that no one knows what evil lurks within their code.

Open source on the GNU license, Avidemux for Windows and Mac is a breath of fresh air. Cropping a video is as simple as highlighting a section to remove and then hitting the Delete key. Re-encoding a video is equally painless: select the output format from the drop-down list, save the file, and you're good to go. When choosing … Read more

Every year at CTIA we dole out praise for those companies that are deserving. CNET's cream of the crop awards recognize the best of the show in four categories: best cell phone, best smartphone, best accessory, and best service. Though the 2008 CTIA wasn't the most exciting on record, we still saw some pretty cool things in Las Vegas. And without further ado, here they are.

Best cell phone: Samsung Instinct In some ways this wasn't a tough choice because so few cell phones were officially unveiled at CTIA. But even if it was facing a more … Read more

Having struggled on many occasions to explain the difference between cameras sensors the size of a full frame of 35mm film and the vastly more common smaller sensors, I thought I'd point readers toward this lucid explanation of one aspect by Canon tech guru Chuck Westfall in his October column with the Digital Journalist. One reason you might want to pay attention: the vast majority of digital SLRs use smaller sensors than film SLRs, though Canon and Nikon have some high-end exceptions.

Westfall details in his article how depth of field changes in relation to sensor size. I'm … Read more

Recently, Power Downloader received an e-mail at the Powerlair from his niece, Kitty Kilobyte. Kitty explained she was stressed out about a project for school. Her assignment was to make a Web site about a specific subject which would include writing out a lot of information along with pictures to illustrate the content. Though she had all the writing done, Kitty was having problems choosing from her high-res photographs and couldn't get them to fit in with the content. She was particularly frustrated that her folder full of images all had unrecognizable file names and she didn't want … Read more