Review: Easily edit images and create collages using Fotor in Windows 8's Modern interface

Fotor Fotor is no Photoshop, but it's simple, fun, and works well for basic image editing.

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If Picasa has taught us anything, it's that not every image editor has to be Photoshop. Sometimes you just want a quick, fun way to enhance your photos, add some neat effects, and maybe create a collage or two. If that sounds like fun and you happen to be rocking a Windows 8 device, you should check out Fotor, a free photo editor that uses the Modern interface. It's fast, visual, and has virtually no learning curve.

Fotor makes it easy to add text overlays to images, but you can control the font size independently.

When you launch Fotor, it lets you open an existing photo to edit, or start working on a collage. It also comes with six sample photos arranged in an attractive grid, to get you started. The simplest way to get a feel for what Fotor is like is to click a sample photo. Do that, and you'll find yourself in the editing interface.

In editing mode, the image dominates most of the screen, and an editing toolbar lines the right side of the screen—opposite where you'd normally expect it, but in keeping with the Modern interface convention. The toolbar is subdivided into eight sections, six of which contain editing tools: Basic editing (color corrections), cropping, effects, borders, focus effects, and text tools. The other two sections let you open new files for editing, and save your work.

Fotor offers numerous effects, including crowd-pleasing Lomo looks

The color correction interface uses sliders, with live image updates: Just move the slider and see the change instantly. Cropping is similarly intuitive, with 11 preset aspect ratios, and a free-crop mode (to set your own aspect ratio). Just drag a frame across the image to set out your crop area, and click Confirm when you're happy with the composition.

Fotor's selective focus tool is the most nuanced one in the app, allowing for fine adjustments.

Image effects are divided into five categories, ranging from Classic to "Dark Corners" (i.e., vignette effects). While each category contains many different effects, individual effects cannot be adjusted in any way. Many of the image modifications are heavy-handed, and Fotor offers no way to tone down the amount of influence a given effect has. Also, you can't layer effects one on top of the other. You need to pick one effect for your image and stick with it. The Borders category is similar: There's a rich selection of borders, but you can't tweak anything, like the size of the margin or the color of a given border.

Fotor's collage mode makes it easy to pick a number of images for your collage.

One category that does offer fine-grained adjustments is the Tilt-Shift Mode, whereby you can apply selective focus effects to your image. Tilt-shift (a "miniature look") isn't the only option: You can also apply a center focus effect, where the subject appears sharp and surrounding detail is blurred out. Both center focus and tilt-shift effects offer many adjustments: You can change the tilt shift's angle, and change either mode's blur radius and virtual aperture size. Of all the tools Fotor offers, selective focus is the most nuanced.

Finally, you can also overlay your image with some text. The text tool offers a limited number of fonts (you can't pick from any font installed on your computer), and lets you pick one of several overlay templates, such as speech or thought bubbles. There is no way to control the font size independently of the template: You can only resize the text along with the speech bubble it's in.

In collage mode, it's easy to move images around, resize the different parts of the collage, or pick one several premade layouts.

All in all, Fotor does what it does quite well. It excels in being quick, and quick to master. Few features are cryptic, and none appear to rely on hidden toolbars you need to slide into view. If you want to edit images in the Modern user interface, Fotor is a great option.

Note: The Download button takes you to the Windows Store, where you can download the software to your system.

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Review: Portrait Professional Studio dramatically transforms your images

There's no such thing as the perfect photo. When we see the finished picture, there's always something about it that we wish we could change. This is more true with portraits than anything else. Pimples, dimples, baggy eyes, wrinkles…but these are all things that can now be removed, with the magic of Portrait Professional Studio.

Photoshop can more than amply handle those tasks. But Photoshop suffers from two great disabilities, its huge learning curve and its huge price. Portrait Professional Studio, on the other hand, is a lot cheaper (although still very expensive by normal software standards) and it has a minimal learning curve. 30 minutes experimenting with a photo will find yourself pretty much on top of all the features, and you'll be stunned by the results.

If necessary, move the lines to the correct facial features, so the software can accurately render the face and move the correct areas when altered.

When you first load your image into Portrait Professional Studio, you will be asked to specify the gender of the person in the image. The best results are when it is a single person and a close-up full-on shot. After specifying the gender, blue marker lines are placed on the face by the software and you have to review these markers to make sure that they are in the right place. You must mark the the corners of each facial feature accurately. It's essential that this is done correctly. Otherwise, when you go to make a change to the image, the marker will change the wrong area.

With the markers correctly in place, you will now see two copies of the image side-by-side. The one on the left will be the "before" picture with the blue marker lines, and the one on the right will be the "after" picture which will change as you use each altering feature. And now the fun begins.

On the right hand side of the screen are your magical powers: a set of sliders which you move from left to right, depending on the effect you want to achieve. The sliders are split up into different categories, so you have ones for the eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks, hair, teeth, and complexion. You can do things such as make the eyes bigger, remove the bags under the eyes, smooth out the complexion, change the eye color, tighten up the face, and make the face thinner or fatter.

If necessary, move the lines to the correct facial features, so the software can accurately render the face and move the correct areas when altered.

There are also a number of presets, where you can achieve certain effects instantly at the click of a button.  So remove the double chin, shorten the nose, whiten the teeth…in short, do the digital equivalent of what a plastic surgeon would do in real life. The main difference being that everything you do in Portrait Professional Studio is instantly and easily reversible. Just click the "undo" button or use the Windows undo command CTRL + Z.

Finally, there's the most powerful tool of all one that all Photoshop users will know right away: the touchup brush.  Using this, you can move over areas of skin that you want to change—a spot, a blemish, a mole, rough skin—and the touchup tool will make those unsightly items disappear, leaving a smooth baby's skin in its place. But when using this tool, make the brush size small and the strength medium, and go slowly. Otherwise you may end up making the subject look like something from Night of the Living Dead.

Finally, step back and admire your work, and see how you have managed to shave at least 10 years off the person's face. If the person is you, your great mood could last the rest of the day.

All in all, Portrait Professional Studio is a powerful software tool for touching up photos, as well as for anyone who works in the media who needs to have picture-perfect models with shiny white teeth and perfect skin.  The only downside to the software is the price, but you get what you pay for.  And with Portrait Professional Studio, you get a lot. If you can't afford Photoshop, take a look at this and give it a go.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Expatriate Scotsman now living in Wurzburg, Germany, freelance writer, frustrated future bestselling author, obsessed bibliophile. Other interests include trying to understand The Architect in the Matrix movies, decrypting codes and ciphers, and trying to persuade my landlord and my wife to let me have a Highland Cow for a pet.
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Review: Skitch Touch makes it easy to annotate images in Windows 8's Modern interface

Evernote-owned free utility Skitch is a great way to annotate images and screenshots. It comes in both Windows and Mac OS X editions, and mobile versions for iOS and Android are available, too. And somewhere between the mobile and desktop versions comes Skitch Touch, the version built for Windows 8's Modern Interface. It has the same simple and pretty annotation tools as the other versions, but being a Modern app, offers less power and features than the traditional Windows version.

Like many other Modern apps, Skitch Touch seems to be designed for screen in the 11- to 13-inch range. On a 24-inch monitor, it ends up displaying vast expanses of white, unused space. As you launch it, Skitch Touch shows a beautiful Create New area on the left side of the screen, letting you create a pull in material to visually annotate from a camera (presumably a tablet's built-in camera, but this feature also works with a regular webcam connected to a computer), a map, a photo or screenshot you've previously taken, an image saved into the clipboard, or a blank canvas.

Skitch Touch makes it easy to start annotating a new image from a variety of sources.

Notably missing is the option to capture a new screenshot. You'll have to use a third-party tool for this, such as Screenshot Captor or ZScreen.

Once you have an image open for editing, annotating it is just as easy as on other Skitch versions. Part of what makes Skitch fun to use is that it doesn't overwhelm the user with numerous tools: There are just seven of them to master. You can draw arrows on your image, enter text, demarcate areas with rectangles, and squiggle with a marker. Other tools let you style your annotations (pick a color and stroke width), pixelate areas of the image, and crop the image. That's basically it—but really, that's all you need to get your point across when annotating an image.

When you're ready to share your work with others, click the Export button, and you can save the image as a JPG or PNG file. This isn't as convenient as being able to drag the image off the window to save it (a feature Skitch for Windows offers), but it works. To save your work as a Skitch document for editing later, click the checkmark on the top-right corner of the screen. Saving files for editing later is another area where Skitch Touch could do better: Unless you log into your Evernote account using Skitch, you only have access your most recently edited file. Once you log into Evernote from Skitch, the main part of the window shows previous files, and you can easily click through to edit them.

Skitch's simple annotation tools go well with the simple Modern visual aesthetic.

Skitch is a fundamentally simple tool, and it already offers mobile versions for iOS and Android, something that helps when designing a Modern app. It's also visual, which is a great quality for a Modern app to have. Thanks to these advantages, Skitch Touch offers a better Modern experience than most apps I've seen so far, and should work especially well on a touch-enabled tablet screen.

Note: The Download button on the Product Specs page takes you to the Windows Store, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Review: SmartDeblur restores blurred images, indulges CSI fantasies

Cellphone cameras make amateur photographers out of all of us. We can relate to making blurred photos, which we normally then delete and forget about. But sometimes those blurry photos contain important information that we must retrieve. In these instances, it might be worth firing up the free SmartDeblur to see if it can work its magic on the picture.

When you open up the app, load the blurred image, and then use the sliders along the top to adjust the picture. Changes are applied almost instantly.

SmartDeblur is a small portable app available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It enables you to work your magic on photos by tweaking a couple of sliders back and forth which changes the colors and contrasts to make the picture slightly clearer.  In the end, it won't produce a perfect high-definition picture worthy of your photo album, but if you're looking to make some information a lot clearer, then this app can probably make some headway.

I'm not going to go into the technical hows and whats of the app, as frankly it's confusing (how many people can claim to know about the "Wiener, Tikhonov, and Total Variation deconvolution methods"?). The developer has written a few tutorials on his website for anyone interested in reading up on the technical side of the app.

The great thing about this app is that if you don't understand the technical side of things, or you don't want to know, you're still covered. The intuitive user interface makes using SmartDeblur absurdly easy. Simply download the portable app, unzip everything into a new folder (making sure you preserve the folder structure), and start up the app.  You are provided with an example image if you want to practice before trying the app on your own pictures.

When you have the picture loaded, simply move the two center sliders, "Radius" and "Smooth," from left to right. Almost immediately, you will see the image start to alter, based on the sliders' positions.  Eventually, you will get the best new version of your photo that you are likely to get, and you can then save the new image to your hard drive.

With a bit of tweaking, the image should become clearer. It will still be blurred, but may now be clear enough to see the information contained in the image.

As I said, it won't make it totally clear, but it may be just clear enough to read that car license plate so you can arrest the bad guys, just like in CSI Miami.  And since it's portable, you can keep it on your USB stick or in your Dropbox folder, to be used on whatever computer you happen to be working on.

All you need now is David Caruso's sunglasses.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Expatriate Scotsman now living in Wurzburg, Germany, freelance writer, frustrated future bestselling author, obsessed bibliophile. Other interests include trying to understand The Architect in the Matrix movies, decrypting codes and ciphers, and trying to persuade my landlord and my wife to let me have a Highland Cow for a pet.
More by Mark O'Neill

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Rumored BlackBerry 10 R-Series Images Leak Showing QWERTY Keyboard

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Review: Automatically resize images on the fly with Robosizer

If you are in the habit of sending images by email, you will know what an absolute pain in the neck it is to go through the tedious process of resizing them to send. It takes up precious timethat  could be better spent using, looking at cute cat pictures on Reddit. You know, more important stuff.

Robosizer is a free software app that sits in your Windows tray, and detects when you are sending an image via one of its supported email programs. When it does it will automatically resize the image for you (leaving the original image intact), according to the pre-set sizes that you specified in the settings beforehand. Robosizer really is a “set-and-forget-it” type of program. Pretty soon, you’ll forget that it is even there (if you switch the notification balloons off).

When Robosizer detects that an image is being sent, it will resize it to the specifications you set, and you will receive a notification bubble telling you it is being done

Installation is a breeze, with no devious toolbars or other nasty software trying to sneak in. When the installation has been completed, however, you will be invited to enter a serial code. It looks as if Robosizer used to be a paid app, but it’s now free. So look in your installation folder, and you will see a text file with a free activation code. Just enter that and you’ll be good to go. The developer has assured me that this minor nuisance will be removed soon.

When you start it up, you will see a little robot face sitting in your Windows tray. Right-click that and choose the settings. It’s here that you need to set up your “profiles” – in other words, the settings for each program. A wide range are covered, (including Firefox, Gmail and Skype) so you are sure to find a few things there that you already use. At the time of writing, Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 is not supported, but the developer is working on fixing that.

Robosizer works with a wide range of popular services such as Gmail, Facebook, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Outlook and many others..

To set up your profile, drop the menu down and choose one. If your program is not there (and Robosizer supports it), click “new”, type the name of the program, and a new profile will be set up for you. You will then see boxes for the “max image width” and “max image height”. You can enter either one or both, in pixels. You can also specify whether or not the height or width should be “enforced”. By that, it means that when resizing, do you want it to specifically focus on the width, the height, or neither? Then specify which file types will be resized (there’s a startling lack of support for GIF images). Rinse and repeat for other profiles. When they have all been completed, click “close” for Robosizer to go back to snoozing in the Windows tray, waiting for an image.

When it spots an image being attached to an email, Robosizer will spring into action, resizing the image and inserting it into your email message. You will get a notification balloon telling you it’s currently going on  and your original image stays in its original location with its size untouched. The resized version sits in Robosizer’s cache folder (the location of which you will find in the “program settings” tab of the Robosizer app). Bear in mind though that these resized images are deleted when you “exit the program or restart the computer”. So if you want to keep copies, do it right away.

I test a lot of stuff out for PC World and I mostly delete it all afterwards when the review is done. But Robosizer is staying put on my computer as it is extremely useful. No longer will I gnash my teeth in frustration when I realize that the enormous David Hasselhoff picture I want to send to someone is needs to be resized. Robosizer, my new friend, will take care of that for me. Thanks Robosizer. You’re my pal. But you won’t be my  BFF until you get along with GIF images.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Expatriate Scotsman now living in Wurzburg, Germany, freelance writer, frustrated future bestselling author, obsessed bibliophile. Other interests include trying to understand The Architect in the Matrix movies, decrypting codes and ciphers, and trying to persuade my landlord and my wife to let me have a Highland Cow for a pet.
More by Mark O'Neill

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Review: Skitch lets you visually highlight images to help your point

When you're standing next to someone, pointing something out is as easy as could be–just lift a finger or nod, and they get what you're talking about. But as soon as the Internet comes in the middle, this sort of quick visual communication becomes much more difficult. I've seen technical writers describe "the button on the bottom right that looks like a paper airplane" in an attempt to point out a single element on the screen. Free application Skitch can restore the visual element to remote communication.

Skitch shows you don't need a toolbar crammed with tools to make for richly annotated images.

Skitch is an application from Evernote that tries to make this sort of information as easy to relay virtually as it is in real life, by making it easy to capture screenshots and annotate them (or any other image). It's not as feature-packed as professional alternative Snagit or open-source powerhouse Screenshot Captor, but that is not a bad thing.

Where other apps pile on the bells and whistles, Skitch goes out of its way to keep things simple and coherent. It launches very quickly, and has a vertical toolbar with a scant seven tools, each with a large, clear icon. These are traditional image annotation tools: An arrow for pointing things out, a text tool, a color picker with a limited palette of just eight colors, a rectangle you can surround objects with, a highlighter, a "pixelizer" for blurring out details, and a crop tool. That's it–no special effects, no fancy filters, and nothing that's going to make your screenshot look like it was taken with a broken Polaroid in 1972 and then forgotten in the bottom of a drawer.

Skitch only lets you use a handful of colors, which is a blessing for color-blind users and others who are not artistically inclined.

Skitch includes an interesting UI widget I haven't seen before: It's a tab that sticks out the bottom of the window, protruding outside the border. The tab just says "Drag Me," and when you comply, you get a local copy of the file. Just drag the tab and drop anywhere, and you have your file right there. A very fuss-free way to save your work or attach it to emails.

The only criticism I can level at Skitch is that it works very hard to get you to use Evernote. Yes, Skitch is free, and it's owned by Evernote, an excellent product in its own right. Integration between the two makes perfect sense, and it's nice to be able to save images directly to Evernote. Doing so, however, requires you to install the standalone Evernote client for Windows, which is much larger than Skitch itself. When you try to close Skitch without first saving your image, a typical prompt shows up, with a twist: You can either abort (keep the application open), discard your work, or... save it to Evernote. The prompt doesn't allow you to save your work locally–if you want to do that, you need to remember to do so from within the application, before you try to close it.

At times Skitch ties in too tightly with Evernote, like when it refuses to let you save an image locally when you quit.

Generally speaking, Skitch is fun and simple to use, and you don't need to read a manual or go through a tedious tour before you start using it. Just run it, open up an image, annotate, and send. Effective visual communication, accomplished.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
More by Erez Zukerman

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Review: Skitch lets you visually highlight images to help your point

When you're standing next to someone, pointing something out is as easy as could be–just lift a finger or nod, and they get what you're talking about. But as soon as the Internet comes in the middle, this sort of quick visual communication becomes much more difficult. I've seen technical writers describe "the button on the bottom right that looks like a paper airplane" in an attempt to point out a single element on the screen. Free application Skitch can restore the visual element to remote communication.

Skitch shows you don't need a toolbar crammed with tools to make for richly annotated images.

Skitch is an application from Evernote that tries to make this sort of information as easy to relay virtually as it is in real life, by making it easy to capture screenshots and annotate them (or any other image). It's not as feature-packed as professional alternative Snagit or open-source powerhouse Screenshot Captor, but that is not a bad thing.

Where other apps pile on the bells and whistles, Skitch goes out of its way to keep things simple and coherent. It launches very quickly, and has a vertical toolbar with a scant seven tools, each with a large, clear icon. These are traditional image annotation tools: An arrow for pointing things out, a text tool, a color picker with a limited palette of just eight colors, a rectangle you can surround objects with, a highlighter, a "pixelizer" for blurring out details, and a crop tool. That's it–no special effects, no fancy filters, and nothing that's going to make your screenshot look like it was taken with a broken Polaroid in 1972 and then forgotten in the bottom of a drawer.

Skitch only lets you use a handful of colors, which is a blessing for color-blind users and others who are not artistically inclined.

Skitch includes an interesting UI widget I haven't seen before: It's a tab that sticks out the bottom of the window, protruding outside the border. The tab just says "Drag Me," and when you comply, you get a local copy of the file. Just drag the tab and drop anywhere, and you have your file right there. A very fuss-free way to save your work or attach it to emails.

The only criticism I can level at Skitch is that it works very hard to get you to use Evernote. Yes, Skitch is free, and it's owned by Evernote, an excellent product in its own right. Integration between the two makes perfect sense, and it's nice to be able to save images directly to Evernote. Doing so, however, requires you to install the standalone Evernote client for Windows, which is much larger than Skitch itself. When you try to close Skitch without first saving your image, a typical prompt shows up, with a twist: You can either abort (keep the application open), discard your work, or... save it to Evernote. The prompt doesn't allow you to save your work locally–if you want to do that, you need to remember to do so from within the application, before you try to close it.

At times Skitch ties in too tightly with Evernote, like when it refuses to let you save an image locally when you quit.

Generally speaking, Skitch is fun and simple to use, and you don't need to read a manual or go through a tedious tour before you start using it. Just run it, open up an image, annotate, and send. Effective visual communication, accomplished.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
More by Erez Zukerman

From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here

Review: Skitch lets you visually highlight images to help your point

When you're standing next to someone, pointing something out is as easy as could be–just lift a finger or nod, and they get what you're talking about. But as soon as the Internet comes in the middle, this sort of quick visual communication becomes much more difficult. I've seen technical writers describe "the button on the bottom right that looks like a paper airplane" in an attempt to point out a single element on the screen. Free application Skitch can restore the visual element to remote communication.

Skitch shows you don't need a toolbar crammed with tools to make for richly annotated images.

Skitch is an application from Evernote that tries to make this sort of information as easy to relay virtually as it is in real life, by making it easy to capture screenshots and annotate them (or any other image). It's not as feature-packed as professional alternative Snagit or open-source powerhouse Screenshot Captor, but that is not a bad thing.

Where other apps pile on the bells and whistles, Skitch goes out of its way to keep things simple and coherent. It launches very quickly, and has a vertical toolbar with a scant seven tools, each with a large, clear icon. These are traditional image annotation tools: An arrow for pointing things out, a text tool, a color picker with a limited palette of just eight colors, a rectangle you can surround objects with, a highlighter, a "pixelizer" for blurring out details, and a crop tool. That's it–no special effects, no fancy filters, and nothing that's going to make your screenshot look like it was taken with a broken Polaroid in 1972 and then forgotten in the bottom of a drawer.

Skitch only lets you use a handful of colors, which is a blessing for color-blind users and others who are not artistically inclined.

Skitch includes an interesting UI widget I haven't seen before: It's a tab that sticks out the bottom of the window, protruding outside the border. The tab just says "Drag Me," and when you comply, you get a local copy of the file. Just drag the tab and drop anywhere, and you have your file right there. A very fuss-free way to save your work or attach it to emails.

The only criticism I can level at Skitch is that it works very hard to get you to use Evernote. Yes, Skitch is free, and it's owned by Evernote, an excellent product in its own right. Integration between the two makes perfect sense, and it's nice to be able to save images directly to Evernote. Doing so, however, requires you to install the standalone Evernote client for Windows, which is much larger than Skitch itself. When you try to close Skitch without first saving your image, a typical prompt shows up, with a twist: You can either abort (keep the application open), discard your work, or... save it to Evernote. The prompt doesn't allow you to save your work locally–if you want to do that, you need to remember to do so from within the application, before you try to close it.

At times Skitch ties in too tightly with Evernote, like when it refuses to let you save an image locally when you quit.

Generally speaking, Skitch is fun and simple to use, and you don't need to read a manual or go through a tedious tour before you start using it. Just run it, open up an image, annotate, and send. Effective visual communication, accomplished.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
More by Erez Zukerman

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Free PDF Image Extractor Offers Easy Way to Unlock Images

Unless you are a dab hand with an image editor, having a utility that can extract images from a PDF is a useful thing, for the maybe three times a year you need it. Fortunately, 4dots Software provides their PDF Image Extractor free of charge, so if you need to extract an image that's locked within a PDF you won't need to also extract your wallet from your pants pocket.

Free PDF Image Extractor offers many options for adjusting your image or batch of images. Unfortunately it does not include a good preview of the changes.Free PDF Image Extractor is easy to use. Simply add as many PDF files as you want—created by any PDF creation software—to the extraction window. Or right-click them in Windows Explorer and choose "Extract Images from PDF" (if you checked Integrate with Windows Explorer at installation; if you unchecked this add-on, you won't have this option). Set your options for saving the images in PDF Image Extractor's Output tab, and advanced image options in the Image Actions tab.

Like some costlier image extractors on the market, Free PDF Image Extractor will only extract the size of the image embedded in the PDF, not the original image. For example, if the original is 4 inches wide at 300 dpi, but it was shrunk by the person who created the PDF to 2 inches at 72 dpi, Free PDF Image Extractor will collect the smaller version. However, Free PDF Image Extractor offers some useful options that can be applied to your extracted images in a batch.

The Image Actions tab includes options for resizing and setting the resolution; adding a watermark, text, or frame; changing the image format; rotating, flipping, and cropping the image; and making adjustments to color and color depth. Free PDF Extractor's success with these options depends greatly on your expectations, plus making any specific adjustments is tricky because PDF Image Extractor provides its own image as a "preview" rather than a real preview of the image you want to extract.

The Free PDF Image Extractor installer is bundled with 4dots Software's own Search Suggestor, a browser toolbar and the Babylon Toolbar. I highly recommend choosing the custom setup and declining the installation of Search Suggestor, proceed with the installation, then also decline the installation of the Babylon Toolbar. Both Search Suggestor and Babylon may cause multiple reports of ad-ware to appear next time you run your anti-malware software.

Of course, Adobe Acrobat X Standard (the $300 version, not free Acrobat Reader) includes a built-in image extractor, as do many other PDF creators. If you're on a budget, Nitro PDF Reader 2 (available in 32-bit and 64-bit editions, both free) can perform the magic of extracting images, as can many of the more expensive (but cheaper than Adobe) PDF-XChange applications available from Tracker Software: the Pro version of PDF-XChange Viewer ($38), PDF Tools ($45) and PDF-XChange Pro ($74) all include the extraction feature.

If you don't need a new PDF reader, are in a big hurry, or just want to get down and dirty with image extraction, 4Dots Software's Free PDF Image Extractor is a no-nonsense tool that won’t make a dent in your wallet.

If you don't have software that can read or annotate PDF, or are still using free Acrobat Reader, try Nitro PDF Reader 2. It's fast, safe, and as a bonus it will extract images like a pro.

—Clare Brandt

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CCFinder An Able Helper For Finding Reusable Images Online

Journalists, bloggers, and designers will find desktop search engine CCFinder (free for basic service, $10 for Plus version) handy because it makes finding legally reusable images on the Internet quick and easy. Photographers can attach one of several different Creative Commons licenses to their images to let online viewers know it is OK to reuse them, and in what way. The CCFinder software aims to take the sting out of the work of finding such images.

CCFinder brings up many reusable images at the click of a button.The rub with this software is that once you click on a picture in CCFinder, you will immediately see the limitations. You can download the photo to your computer for no charge, but color filters and PDF downloading are disabled by default until you pay a "donation" of $10. If you like the software and use it a lot, you may decide upgrading to the Plus model makes sense.

Operating CCFinder isn't a problem. Just enter your search term (as you would with any other search engine), choose which filter you want and press "go." The images that match your search term and filter will then be presented and you can click on one to see it in a much larger size.

On the larger image screen, you are presented with the various terms and conditions for that image so you don't run afoul of the photographer's wishes and misuse the image. You are told if you need to attribute the image to the photographer or not, under what circumstances the image can be used (commercial or non-commercial), and whether or not you can alter the photo in any way.

Overall, CCFinder is a nice little desktop program if you find yourself looking for the right image to accompany a blog post, or if you need some visual inspiration for designs of your own. The only thing stopping it from getting a higher rating is the constant nagging for the $10 upgrade. But if you can learn to ignore that, this is worth keeping on your PC.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

—Mark O'Neill

From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here

CCFinder An Able Helper For Finding Reusable Images Online

Journalists, bloggers, and designers will find desktop search engine CCFinder (free for basic service, $10 for Plus version) handy because it makes finding legally reusable images on the Internet quick and easy. Photographers can attach one of several different Creative Commons licenses to their images to let online viewers know it is OK to reuse them, and in what way. The CCFinder software aims to take the sting out of the work of finding such images.

CCFinder brings up many reusable images at the click of a button.The rub with this software is that once you click on a picture in CCFinder, you will immediately see the limitations. You can download the photo to your computer for no charge, but color filters and PDF downloading are disabled by default until you pay a "donation" of $10. If you like the software and use it a lot, you may decide upgrading to the Plus model makes sense.

Operating CCFinder isn't a problem. Just enter your search term (as you would with any other search engine), choose which filter you want and press "go." The images that match your search term and filter will then be presented and you can click on one to see it in a much larger size.

On the larger image screen, you are presented with the various terms and conditions for that image so you don't run afoul of the photographer's wishes and misuse the image. You are told if you need to attribute the image to the photographer or not, under what circumstances the image can be used (commercial or non-commercial), and whether or not you can alter the photo in any way.

Overall, CCFinder is a nice little desktop program if you find yourself looking for the right image to accompany a blog post, or if you need some visual inspiration for designs of your own. The only thing stopping it from getting a higher rating is the constant nagging for the $10 upgrade. But if you can learn to ignore that, this is worth keeping on your PC.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

—Mark O'Neill

From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here

Hipster Review: A Fun Way to Take Images and Share Them With the World

If you took a picture on your smartphone but nobody sees it, did you really take it? Hipster lets you solve that particular philosophical dilemma by offering a simple way to customize an image into a funky digital postcard and upload it for the world to marvel at.

To get started with Hipster, you'll need a picture that you want to customize. You can either take a new picture--using whichever camera app you have installed--or you can choose a picture from your gallery. Once you have an image to work with, you pick a look: Hipster contains a long list of preset styles, each with its own color effect and frame. Each preset has space for a caption which, by default, contains your location. You can easily edit the caption, and your text will carry through all of the presets as you pick and choose the one that's right for you.

Despite its variety of styles, image customization in Hipster ends up feeling limited. You can't mix and match frames or styles, and you can't control how the text looks on an image.

On the plus side, Hipster's community is fun and active. Both the app and the Hipster.com website contain a gallery where you can view and comment on other people's public photos. Several of the photographs I came across in the gallery looked quite beautiful, and you can spend a fair amount of time browsing the works of other Hipster savants. From the Hipster app, you can comment on images, follow other users, or "like" photographs--the same basic things you can do on the Hipster website.

Hipster may not rival other image processing apps for power and flexibility, but its vibrant community makes it a fun choice for sharing photos, and for looking at beautiful, spontaneous pictures from all over the world.

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