faststone

FastStone Image Viewer Portable is a full-featured image-handling application that happens to be totally portable and totally free. It's an image file browser, editor, and converter that bundles the most useful editing tools, such as red-eye removal, lossless rotation, resizing, and color adjustment, as well as various effects, text, captions, and frames. It creates self-running slideshows, photo contact sheets, wallpaper, and other displays; downloads digital photos; converts, renames, and changes the attributes of batches of files; changes time stamps; compares images; splits and combines files; captures screen images; e-mails images; and a lot more.

FastStone Image Viewer's fully … Read more

A recent review of Corel Digital Studio 2010 got me close and personal with the consumer-oriented multimedia suite. Corel's studio excelled at providing a consistent, unified look, navigation, and toolset across its applications for editing photos and videos, making movies, burning content, and playing videos. It also copies photos, videos, and music to your mobile device, and can create photo projects like photo books and cards.

All good stuff, but it doesn't come cheap. Multimedia suites like this will put you out about $100. They're worth the price if you frequently use the tools, or if you vastly prefer the convenience and accessibility of a consumer-friendly setup. However, if you don't mind being scrappy, you can cobble together a spread of multimedia tools--your own "suite"--for next to nothing.

Edit and create

Photo editing, video editing, and making movies are the three largest focal points of multimedia suites like Corel Digital Studio 2010 and Roxio Creator 2010 (unfortunately, no download trial is available for the latter). Google's Picasa is one of my favorite freeware tools for casual users, and one of the closest direct matches to what's offered in a multimedia suite. Its uses are multifarious: organizing your photos and videos into albums, editing images and videos, sharing online, creating projects like collages and movies, and ordering prints.

The image-editing tools are serviceable, with red-eye removal, one-click lighting fixes, cropping and straightening, and finer tools for addressing blemishes and lighting. There are also 12 effects, like sepia tones and soft focus. This contrasts with Picasa's low-grade video editor, which can at least rotate videos and trim them. The movie maker has many more controls, but is basic; it doesn't build in the polished templates of a premium program. Picasa does, however, offer to sell you prints from a choice of providers (choice is good), and can help create a collage.

For standalone photo editing, the freeware applications FastStone Image Viewer, IrfanView, Paint.NET, and GIMP range in features from the accessible to the powerful. Read more about them in this resource guide.

Vista and Windows 7 users can try out Microsft's new Windows Live Movie Maker (review), freeware that can slap photos and video clips into a new movie in seconds. Deeper controls let you tweak transitions, captions, and effects after the automation. Editing tools include splitting, trimming, and applying fade points. As a point of comparison, video editors in these consumer-focused multimedia suites are better-equipped, perhaps with audio-tuning tools and features to adjust video lighting.

Creating calendars and photo books are a DIY project within your reach if you have an excellent photo printer and a home bookbinding kit. Otherwise, you can spend your energy on the editing and captioning and get a project printed somewhere else. Retail shops, like FedEx Office in the U.S., will print projects. Online photo albums and services like Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Zazzle will also gladly accept your business. The 12-month calendars run from $15 to $20; large photo books are often in the mid-$30 range (online services often charge for shipping). Corel Digital Studio is similarly priced.… Read more

Image resizing should be a simple problem to solve, except that it seems like everybody and their dog--sorry, cat-lovers--has a lightweight, freeware image editor out there. For example, there's Image Resizer. The name is simple, the installer weighs in at a rail-thin 357 KB, and it's free. Can't argue with that, right?

Except that it barely works, at least when I tested it. The interface would be fine, back when Windows 3.1 was new. It's nothing less than a giant pain now that we have such cutting-edge improvements as long filenames. My attempts to convert … Read more

If you're looking for a fast, reliable, and free way to convert many images at once, look no further than FastStone Photo Resizer. From the same folks who publish the excellent Image Viewer, Photo Resizer outputs files in the most popular formats, including TIFF, GIF, JPEG, and BMP. Besides its batch-conversion skills, the application also can rename pictures in bulk. This program lacks any sort of fancy image effects, but you can make basic tweaks, including cropping, rotating, resizing, and adjusting certain aspects of an image's color. You'll even find a tool for stamping shots with a … Read more

I download and review a lot of great software, but obviously I don't keep everything. Some programs don't make the cut simply because I have a better option on my computer already or I have no use for them at work. But other applications I've downloaded have withstood the test of time and remain useful on a day-to-day basis. I'm talking about my must-have applications.

I've already given you my Big Three free security applications which should be the first programs you download when setting up a computer. Clearly if you haven't downloaded software … Read more

The FastStone Image Viewer is a good find for a multipurpose image tool. Although the main interface looks too cluttered with buttons at first glance, the three main windows are intuitive enough once get your bearings and several included skins make it easy on the eyes.

Clicking a thumbnail puts a larger view of the shot in the lower-left pane, and you zoom in simply by dragging the mouse around. You can resize, crop, remove red-eye, and adjust color, brightness, and contrast. You'll also find a few simple effects and filters, including Lens, Waves, and Morphs. Other nifty features … Read more

Every computer user needs a good screen capture utility at one time or another. Whether doing a Web research project, getting a slick new desktop background, or just adding to an image collection, the flexibility of these utilities make them much more useful than the full-screen capture in Windows. As a reviewer of software, I often need to take screenshots of programs I'm reviewing. A screen capture utility lets me capture the whole program, or just a section of the screen depending on what I want to call out.

Windows comes with the Print Screen function which saves a … Read more

Once I've taken care of installing security software on a new a PC, one of the first programs I end up downloading is an image editor. Whether I'm using it to make a quick edit to a screenshot, convert a digital photo to a more Web-friendly image format, or even something as mundane as cropping an image for a desktop background, an easy-to-use image editor is a must have. Those of you with recently acquired computers probably have a lot of holiday photos you've resolved to go through, so this little collection will definitely come in handy.… Read more

With the holidays over and only a few days to go in 2007, Power Downloader decided to take a look back at the year to relive some of his more exciting adventures. Always knowing which software to download in a given emergency is never easy, but having Download.com at his disposal definitely helps when on the trail of an Internet bad guy.

Looking through his case files, Power Downloader remembered the time when he had to get a new laptop computer. As with anytime Power needs to get a new computer, he knew he wouldn't be comfortable until … Read more