Chris Pirillo » photo-edit

Cheap Mac Software with MacGraPhoto 2

Chris Pirillo — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 18:12:27 +0000

Good software is insanely expensive. Great software is usually out of the realm of purchasing possibility for many of you. This is why MacGraPhoto has worked hard to bring you nine fantastic graphics applications for a seriously low price. There are only nineteen days left to take advantage of this offer, so you’d better not procrastinate. Even if you don’t think you’ll need all of these titles yourself, why not grab them while you can and then give a few away as gifts during the holidays?

Included in your $39.99 bundle (which would normally sell for over four hundred bucks) is:

AtomicView – AtomicView is a digital asset manager (DAM) software program that allows users to organize, browse, and output photos, images, videos, and sounds. A flexible and fast video and image conversion and transformation tool optimized for multicore computers.
Hydra – Hydra provides human eye-like perception to your photographs by allowing you to create High Dynamic Range (HDR) images from a series of regular photographs.
ImageFramer – ImageFramer is an easy-to-use but powerful application for framing your images and photos with beautiful photo-realistic and artistic frames.
Layers – Layers captures every window, every palette, every menu, every menu and status bar icon, every icon on the Desktop, and even the Dock and the Desktop background for each of your connected displays will be saved as a separate editable layer in the resulting Photoshop image file.
Posterino – With a focus on ease-of-use, Posterino 2 creates life posters, photo collages, frames, postcards, greeting cards and contact sheets from digital images. Posterino does the hard work while users just have to fine tune the results.
Snapshot – Snapshot brings the power of a photo lab to your computer. Printing your digital images has never been easier.
Sandvox – Sandvox is easy-to-use, popular, award-winning, do-it-yourself web site builder for Mac. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned pro — when it comes to building a website on your Mac, Sandvox is considered the best web design software for Mac.
Sketch – An innovative and fresh look at vector drawing for the Mac. Its intentionally minimalist design is based upon a drawing space of unlimited size and layers, free of palettes, panels, menus, windows, and controls.
Swift Publisher – With Swift Publisher, publishing attractive and informative documents for business, social and home activities becomes a snap.
DVD Library BONUS! – DVD-Library lets you catalog, manage and backup your DVDs on Mac in a visual library. Just enter part of the title or UPC of the DVD (including Blu-ray DVDs), DVD-Library will automatically retrieve the DVD’s cover and all relevant info from Amazon, quick and easy.

You can even end up getting this entire bundle for free. When you purchase your bundle, you will receive an email with a personalized link in it to give out to others. If three or more people purchase the bundle themselves using your link, you will receive a full refund when the promotion ends! How cool is that?

Life is much easier when you have great software to help you accomplish your goals. Life is even sweeter when that software is affordable!

Cheap Mac Software with MacGraPhoto 2

Will Adobe CS5 be Great – or Should You Wait?

Chris Pirillo — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 04:55:19 +0000

Will Adobe CS5 be Great – or Should You Wait?

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I haven’t yet had a chance to use Adobe CS5 myself. However, I do know that it’s a powerful – albeit expensive – program. There are free or open-source alternatives I can use. Most of the photo editing I do these days can be done inside of Picasa. However, there is one feature inside of CS5 that is absolutely killer.

You know how you can use the clone tool in a photo editing program? Most of the time, it’s a difficult process. You can take a screenshot of what’s going on with my live stream. If you wanted to crop out the iPad in the front, you’d need to painstakingly replace it with part of the curtains to block it out. However, CS5 makes this a seamless and beautiful process. It’s almost magical to watch.

Adobe products work well, even if they’re a little advanced for most people’s needs. However, the price tag on many of them (including CS5) rules out the software for most of us.

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Will Adobe CS5 be Great – or Should You Wait?

Edit Photos Online for Free

Chris Pirillo — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 05:27:23 +0000

Edit Photos Online for Free

Aviary has long been one of the best online photo editing services. Up until now, people were required to pay about $25.00 a year in order to take advantage of everything the site offers. However, thanks to recent funding increases from outside sources, the service is now 100% free! Existing paying customers will no longer be billed, and those that signed up in the last 30 days will get a full refund.

Aviary is quite powerful, yet simple to use. It allows you to do so much more than apply simple edits to your pictures. There are vector editor, color editor, and even image markup tools available. You can use Aviary to create logos and websites, or try out your own color palette! There is no limit to what you can do with this excellent image site, other than your own imagination. Aviary has been compared with Adobe’s free online version of Photoshop. However, you are limited to only 2 GB of usage with Adobe. Why limit yourself in any way? You no longer have to with Aviary!

Go ahead and try it out, and let us know what your thoughts are. I’ve been playing around with some of my pictures, and I’m pretty impressed with the results. I’m thankful that someone in our community posted the news about this earlier. We have such a talented group of people on all of our sites! What have you been posting – and reading – today?

Make sure you stop by our Software Center to see what new deals we have for you today!

Edit Photos Online for Free

How to Create a Digital Photo Mask with Ease

Chris Pirillo — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 23:03:01 +0000

How to Create a Digital Photo Mask with Ease

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You know I’m a software addict. I like all kinds of software, and I especially love software that does what it needs to do VERY well – and if it’s available on both Mac OS X and Windows. I believe I may be able to get you a coupon for the Tiffen Dfx.

The new version of Tiffen Dfx features multiple masking and layering capabilities with its Photoshop and Aperture plug-ins, previously only offered with the Stand-alone edition, plus more than 1,000 new filters and effects including: Ambient Light, Close Up Lens, Dot, Eye Light, Flag, Gobo, HFX Star, Haze, High Contrast, Ice Halos, Rainbows, Sepia, Sky, Soft Contrast, Soft Light, Warm Center Spot, Warm Polarizer, Water Droplets, Wide Angle Lens and 812 Warming.

There are 133 Tiffen filters included in the software, and hundreds of effects are sprinkled throughout the various filters. There’s a very wide array of them. Being the visual person that I am, it’s nice to see the thumbnails that the program will give you upon opening it up.

You can save your presets in order to use them again at a later date, with ease. This makes it nice if you have a project you have to go back and work on at a later time. It’s also great for graphic artists.

Masks are usually difficult to do. However, the EZ Mask (one of 7 different mask types) lets users create multiple masks with just a few quick clicks. With the multiple layering, people can easily add multiple filters on a single Photoshop layer. Filters and masks can be easily copied between Dfx layers.

I can’t get over how simple this is. If you do any kind of photo editing, you really need to check this out. It’s an amazing program… and cross platform!

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How to Create a Digital Photo Mask with Ease

Can the iPhone Help You Edit Photos?

Chris Pirillo — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 06:36:02 +0000

Can the iPhone Help You Edit Photos?

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Hold still and don’t move, while I take your picture with my iPhone. Now that I have saved it, I need to adjust some settings in the image. We’ve talked about image editors for the iPhone before. But now, there’s an iPhone App that you can use either on your iPhone, or online at ezimba.

ezimba is an image conversion web service. It provides a number of useful and cool image conversion tools for simply transforming and manipulating images of various kinds via your browser. Alternatively you can download the ezimba application and do your conversions right from your iphone. Either way, these conversions are always available online: powerful, easy to use – and free.

ezimba is an anonymous and confidential service. Uploaded files are given unique codes and aren’t visible to anyone else on the internet. All temporary files are eventually purged. ezimba doesn’t require your login, your email address, your credit card, your mother’s maiden name – or anything else for that matter. Thus you will never be spammed or annoyed by ezimba in any way.

ezimba will take an image from your iPhone and upload it to the website. You can then apply any one of tons of effects and tools to your picture. There are entirely too many features to list here, so you’ll have to check it out for yourself.

You don’t have to have an iPhone to use ezimba. Just sign up for a free account on the website, and start uploading your pictures from your computer. I don’t think you could pack this many effects into many of the paid programs you could spend a lot of money on. Make sure you check it out and tell me what you think of your new picture creations.

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Can the iPhone Help You Edit Photos?

How can You Edit Photos on the iPhone?

Chris Pirillo — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 04:10:12 +0000

How can You Edit Photos on the iPhone?

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Yes, the iPhone has a camera. Can you do anything with the photos other than rotate them, email them or save them to the computer? Not really, you can’t. That’s why you should pick up Picoli from the App store. It’s extensive in what it can do.

Picoli is a fairly new image editing iPhone application. It allows you to place one filter- such as making the picture brighter or sharper- one over another, which can become annoying. On the upside it works really well and can make up for the iPhones 2 megapixel camera. Once you are done editing you can save it back into your camera roll and delete the original if wanted.

Some of the effects that can be used with Picoli are brightness, sharpness, contrast, sepia, night vision, sunburn, and mirroring left and right and up and down. It will also allow you to flip the picture 90 degrees when needed. This app has some interesting and useful tools but will cost you $5.00.

I can almost guarantee this is going to be a top app very quickly. It works very well, and as I said… the amount of things you can do with it is extensive. Each of the different effects or filters you wish to use are simple to figure out as well. Just move the slider to the right or left until the photo is to your liking. You can pick and choose which filters need to be tweaked for each picture.

So for only $5.00, you can have a powerful and easy photo editor right on your iPhone. Gotta love the App Store!

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How can You Edit Photos on the iPhone?

Where do you Find Photo Fun?

Chris Pirillo — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:27:54 +0000

Where do you Find Photo Fun?

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I love being able to manipulate images on my computer and even within my web cam. There are just so many different things you can do. If you visit Cameroid online and click on the “Scenes” button, you can apply any of their pre-defined themes or templates to your images. Cameroid is free, and simple to use. It lets you take crazy pictures from right within your browser. Cameroid is brought to us by the makers of SlideShow.

There’s nothing to install. You have to have Adobe Flash on your computer. And, of course, you need a web cam. You don’t need a web cam with sound if you don’t have one. There are some really cool templates on Cameroid. There’s a monkey, the Mona Lisa, a ninja, Frankenstein, and even a GNOME! You don’t have to apply one of the scenes. You can also distort the image, blur it, select certain areas, or change the color filters. If you want to take a fun but serious photo, you can add any one of several different frames around yourself.

The images can be easily saved to your hard drive to upload elsewhere or email to friends. Want to see some of what I did?

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Where do you Find Photo Fun?

Can you Paint Graphics in your Web Browser?

Chris Pirillo — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:52:20 +0000

Can you Paint Graphics in your Web Browser?

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I’m still struggling to find an image editor that I can really fall in love with. I’ve tried pretty much everything out there. I want it to be powerful, but simple at the same time. In some cases, all I need is a quick and easy way of doing one thing, and may not have software installed. I could use… Microsoft Paint. What? Nah, not gonna happen. I’m just not good with it, and need something better when creating an image. What do you use when you need to create or draw something? I’m talking simple… not Photoshop Elements. I’m still looking for something I’ll probably never find.

Until I find one that truly floats my boat, I’ll be usingSumoPaint. My friend David sent this along to me. You know I love web-based apps that are useful, and this one definitely is. SumoPaint gives you simple but powerful tools for creating and/or editing images right in your browser. You don’t even have to sign up for an account. There’s nothing to install, of course. You can then save your images to your computer, or to your SumoPaint account if you chose to register one. There are tons of tools included. You can select, move, smudge or blur. You can add text. You can zoom in and out, flip the canvas and so much more.

Thanks, David, for passing this along. It will definitely stay in my bookmarks. I’d love to see something like this inside an Adobe Air application, for sure.

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Can you Paint Graphics in your Web Browser?

Adobe Photoshop Elements on Vista

Chris Pirillo — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 03:00:48 +0000

Adobe Photoshop Elements on Vista

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http://live.pirillo.com/ – Yes, Photoshop Elements works on Vista. It’s a good little program, with an ok user interface. There are also other good programs out there to quickly and easily edit your photographs… even some free ones!

Adobe Photoshop Elements combines power and simplicity so you can do more with your photos. If you’re looking for a user-friendly photo editing program that is great for most levels of computer users, this is an excellent choice. It has very little learning curve to it, unlike some of the more high end programs. Personally, I use PhotoFilter. It is for more advanced users, but it’s an awesome program. I’ve also used Picasa for many years. If all you need to do is basic cropping, maybe some red-eye reduction, then Picasa is definitely the way to go. Best of all… Picasa is free now that Google owns it. That’s right, you heard me. FREE.

There are many good free (and pay) photo editing software out there on the market. The chatters are throwing out programs like Gimp, Paint.net, and even Photoshop Proper. Decide what you need to do with your photos, and do your research before buying any picture editing software.

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Adobe Photoshop Elements on Vista