Nokia Lumia 929 Case Appears Online With Photos

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Future iPhones Could Share Data by Snapping Photos

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From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Customize and alter your photos with PC Image Editor

It’s a common misconception that you need Photoshop to get really good looking photos. The truth is that there are many excellent image editors out there on the Internet that allow you to make changes to your photos which are as good as anything Photoshop could do. PC Image Editor is one such app, free for personal use ($24 for business use), which allows you to make changes to your images.

Installation is extremely easy and extremely fast, with no hidden spyware surprises trying to sneak in, such as toolbars. When starting it up for the first time, you will be told that the software is free for personal use, while commercial users need to purchase a license. This becomes one of the main irritants of the entire software app – every time you open up the app to use it for free, that same nag screen is going to keep coming up because you haven’t entered a license code yet. I really hope the developer provides some way in a future release for free users to disable that screen as it gets really annoying after a while.

PC Image Editor provides you with lots of options to customize your images. The photo updates in real time as you tweak each option.

Once you’ve zapped the nag screen, click “open” and navigate to the image you want to make adjustments to. Then on the right hand side, you will see all of the tools  open to you. For example, you can resize the photo to either a size that you specify or one of the predefined sizes that the app offers. You can also rotate to various angles, zoom, sharpen, as well as change the color and contrast .
There are also numerous effects on offer which takes a page out of Photoshop's book. PC Image Editor offers a wide range of filters and effects such as blurring, twirling (turning the picture into a round shape) and changing the angle of the picture. If you would like to achieve a unique effect to the picture, then the filters include embossing, halftone (which pretty much turns the color picture black and white), and changing the RGB values of the colors.

Each adjustment can easily be made by moving the slider back and forth.

Every change is made in real time so you can see how each step of the affects the image. If you realize you’re making a right dog’s dinner of the image, you can click the “undo” button to roll back the last change you made. Once everything is to your satisfaction, you can save or print the new image . Formats which you can save in include all the usual suspects such as JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP and TIFF.

There is also the option to scan an image directly into PC Image Editor using a scanner, but every time I clicked on the “scan” button, PC Image Editor crashed and closed. I don’t know if this is a Windows 8 issue or an issue with PC Image Editor. So it may work for you. Let us know in the comments below if this is a problem you encounter.

These days, with ready access to image editors, there is no excuse for bad photos. If you find that your images need a bit of jazzing up,PC Image Editor offers a basic selection of  editing tools that provide the most-used features of more expensive applications. Although it’s not the best image editing program ever, it’s worth a try if you need a few basic tweaks.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

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

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Alleged Samsung Galaxy S4 Design Leaks in New Photos

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Download Instagram photos in bulk with 4K stogram

Type in an Instagram username, and instantly download their image feed. It's not often I can describe 100% of an application's functionality in a single sentence, but when it comes to free utility 4K Stogram, I just did.

4K Stogram takes an Instagram username and downloads their photo feed in one fell swoop.4K Stogram doesn't require you to log in to Instagram; it doesn't have a preferences dialog, and offers no way to Like photos or comment on them. It can't be used to view or download tag feeds. It doesn't even let you pick a location for the images it downloads, instead making the decision for you. In other words, it is an exercise in focus, and is as bare-bones as it could possibly be.

If you are looking for a more complete Instagram client for Windows, you might want to check out free Pokki app Instagrille, which lets you read and reply to comments, Like photos, and more. But if all you need is to download Instagram photos in bulk, that's exactly what 4K Stogram does.

—Erez Zukerman

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Make Fast Work of Finding Photos with Lost Photos

We used to dig through drawers and shoeboxes to find old photos. But now we dig through digital archives, like email accounts. Lost Photos (free for Windows, $3 for Mac) is a handy application that makes dusting off your snapshots a breeze.

Lost Photos makes it easy to find photos buried in the depths of your email account.To use it, you simply install it, enter your email address and password, and let it go to work. Lost Photos can scan AOL, Gmail, Google Apps, iCloud/MobileMe, and Yahoo email accounts for—you guessed it—lost photos.

It sifts through all of the messages in your account, looking for any images. You can set it to ignore images received before a certain date, or images that are smaller than 8k in size (which are more likely to be logos and icons than actual photographs). You also can have it ignore GIFs, which may be animations rather than photos.

That's all you have to do: Lost Photos does the rest, locating the images and saving them to your hard drive.

Unfortunately, it saves them to a folder it creates on your C: drive, rather than letting you select the location or create a new folder for this purpose. And the application is subject to the bandwidth limits of your email provider: After locating almost 2,000 folders in my Gmail account in just a few hours, Lost Photos suggested that I pause it for 24 hours, so as not to cause any problems with my email provider's own limitations. This is only a suggestion, though, and you can choose to dismiss it if you're throwing caution to the wind.

Once your photos are located, you can browse them within Lost Photo's excellent interface. The application is streamlined and attractive, making it easy to use. You can browse through thumbnails, and can click on one to see a larger version of the photo. From here, you can post it to Facebook or Twitter, or share it via email. And once the photos are downloaded to your hard drive, you're free to do with them as you please.

Lost Photos isn't just a fun application, it's pretty useful, too.

—Liane Cassavoy

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Use Your Naked Photos to Track Skin Cancer

After your summer tan begins to fade and you worry about all the damage you may have done to your skin, wouldn’t it be great if you could check out your skin for potential skin cancer without trekking to your doctor? Now there’s an app for that. But there’s a catch: You’ll have to fully expose yourself for results.

The University of Michigan developed the iPhone app, coined UMSkinCheck (free), to help you conduct a self exam and detect skin cancer warning signs. Background info within the app says that “studies have shown that total body photography can be an important tool in helping track skin changes that could indicate skin cancer.”

And while whole body photographic self-diagnosis already exists, the app aims to make it a bit simpler – and cheaper. Instead of hiring a professional photographer for full body shots, the app allows you to take multiple shots of different body parts. In other words, take 23 nude photographs in 7 different poses that will be stored on an app. And you can’t take all the photos yourself, so you’ll have to enlist a friend to help.

The app includes useful tools in addition to the full-body survey: You can do a self-exam, where it guides you through checking parts of your body that are most likely to have exposure to sun, a lesion tracker, so you can note if sunspots on your body have changed or become abnormal, and a risk calculator, which asks questions like your race and amount of freckles to determine your chance of developing melanoma.

There’s also important information on sun damage and tips on how to stay safe. A Characteristics of Melanoma tab shows images of what potential skin cancer could look like, a Sun Safety tab has tips on how to preserve your skin while outside and a Sunscreen Tips tab has lots of info on what kind of sunscreen to use and when to use it. And there’s a helpful feature for links on learning more about skin cancer and preventing it.

Thankfully the app has a password protection setting, which, when enabled, keeps your information and images private. But it really freaked us out that users had to think to enable the feature; otherwise their photos could be available to who knows who. Creepy.

You can also set up notification times for when you should do a self-exam or check lesions. And you can set an exam frequency of every 30, 45, 60, 75 or 90 days, so you’ll be reminded to conduct regular exams.

It’s an interesting concept, and we’d certainly like to track potential skin cancer on ourselves since doctor visits typically only occur annually. But we’re not quite ready to fork over 23 naked photos, even if they’re for a good cause.

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Kodak Hero 3.1 All-in-One Printer Review: Bargain Price, Cheap Ink, Great Photos

The Kodak Hero 3.1 color inkjet multifunction printer offers a lot of bang for the buck. At only $100 (as of April 2, 2012) this copying/printing/scanning device produces exceptionally nice photos, and its inexpensive inks make it cheaper to operate than other MFPs in its price range. Kodak also provides some elegant software, though it suffered from a glitch in our testing.

We miss the Kodak-gold highlighting of older models, but the Hero 3.1 is a competent-looking unit that appears to be reasonably well built. Its paper-handling features are strictly low-volume: a 100-sheet rear vertical feed, manual-only duplexing, and no automatic document feeder. Disappointingly, for a unit that lacks an ADF, the scanner lid (for letter/A4-size paper) doesn't telescope to accommodate thicker documents.

The Hero 3.1's controls, on the other hand, seem more upscale because of the 2.4-inch color LCD display, which you navigate by means of a four-way rocker and a select button. A single Start button initiates all operations; you choose between black and color printing by selecting from the appropriate menus prior to the operation, which adds steps. But that's a minor fault in an otherwise easy-to-operate machine.

The software glitch we encountered occurred in Microsoft Word 2007: The print properties dialog box took some 20 seconds or so to open. Kodak confirmed our suspicion of poor interaction between Word and the printer monitoring software. After we closed the monitor, the print properties dialog box popped open almost immediately.

Back to the good news: The Hero 3.1 surpasses the least-expensive tier of MFPs on the market with its excellent photo quality and very good (though slightly soft-edged) text quality. Color graphics on plain paper are quite nice, too, offering a more accurate palette than most other units in its price range.

Though the Hero 3.1's output is very nice, it arrives slowly. Text pages printed at a slothful 3.3 pages per minute in both our PC test and our Mac test. Draft mode is at least twice as fast, but output from that mode can suffer the soft-edge defect. Graphics print speeds were more in line with those of competing machines: 4-by-6-inch photos printed at 2.3 ppm on plain paper and at 1.3 ppm on glossy photo paper--slower than average, but not by much. A full-page photo printed on glossy paper took about 4 minutes. Scans and copies were slower than average, too, but the waiting time shouldn't torment you in small doses. We noticed minor alignment issues on some documents printed in draft mode.

No other vendor prices the inks for its cheaper MFPs as low as Kodak does. Black pages from the 335-page low-capacity black cartridge (priced at $13) cost 3.9 cents per page; the 670-page XL cartridge ($20) reduces that figure to just 3 cents per page. Color costs are equally appealing. The regular $20 cartridge lasts for 275 pages or 7.3 cents per page (2.43 cents per page per color) and that drops to 6.5 cents per page with the 550-page XL cartridge ($36). Bear in mind that this is a unified, tricolor cartridge; if you don't use the colors evenly, color cost per page can be higher. Still a four-color page for as little as 9.5 cents per page is a major attraction.

Aside from the software glitch, the Hero 3.1 appears to be quite a bargain for a color inkjet MFP. But it still pays to compare it to similar rivals such as the Epson Stylus NX430 and the HP Photosmart 5510.

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Organize Photos Fast With PicaJet FX

If you're like me, you have oodles of digital images, sorted vaguely by date or (if you're lucky) description. Using any database system to sort and label all of your images is a daunting process: After all, you have to not dread using it for it to be worthwhile. Fortunately, the $60 PicaJet FX can create as many category folders, subfolders, and folders within your subfolders as you want. One of the best features of PicaJet FX is that there are no limitations to the levels in which you can bury your images. And PicaJet can place the same image into multiply folders, making the family vacation images easy to find by person, location, date, or any other categories you add.

PicaJet FX automatically creates an Unsaved Metadata folder for any images that have undergone changes to metadata information like descriptions or categories. You can review this information before storing it to the embedded image IPTC/XMP file. On running the program for the first time, PicaJet gives you the option of scanning folders to look for image files; or importing an existing Adobe Photoshop Album or Photoshop Elements 3 Catalog. Fortunately, if you have gigabytes of images but no existing Albums, unlike many image management programs---notably free Picasa, and Serif's Photo Organizer, which comes bundled with the $90 PhotoPlus X5---PicaJet gives you some options before you tie up your computer for days. With PicaJet, you can choose the folders to scan (and you can always add more later if you're short on time or are just trying before you buy); also choose to create categories from folder names or IPTC keywords, set PicaJet to ignore files smaller than a certain size, and include subfolders or not.

PicaJet doesn't make it obvious that it's really simple to assign category folders, but it really is fast and easy. Hold down the Control key, click on the tiny paperclip icon next to the folder, then click on the image you want to add to those categories. Or you can drag and drop multiple images into one folder. Unfortunately, PicaJet doesn't have facial recognition. Try free Fotobounce or MAGIX Photo Manager MX Deluxe if that's a feature you're interested in.

PicaJet FX can help you edit your images non-destructively, rotate, crop, adjust color, brightness, hue, etc., even take out red eye. PicaJet's image editing tools are easy to use, but I found it frustrating that once I clicked to make an adjustment--to change brightness for example--I couldn't undo, plus the "before" image changed. Compared to free image editors: GIMP, MAGIX Photo Designer, or Photoscape to name a few, PicaJet's image editing capabilities are basic and functional.

Unlike the elegant Pictomio (a free image organizing system), PicaJet doesn't include slick carousel views or 3D optimization. But it's fast. Really fast. And you can still create very impressive-looking HTML photo galleries and slideshows.

Your images remain totally in your control with PicaJet MX: You can view and edit the metadata of your images in your PicaJet database, and things like captions you add in PicaJet are stored in your image's EXIF and IPTC data. However, unlike with some other image databases, including Picasa, none of my metadata was replaced or deleted in PicaJet.

Do I like filing my images? No. Do I like it more with PicaJet? It's better than a shoebox; it's easier than setting up folders and subfolders and sub-subfolders in My Images; it's relatively quick; and I'm not giving away my privacy by using it. So yes, I think PicaJet FX is worth the money. But if you really don't have money to spend, take a look at the PicaJet Free version. It doesn't include nearly as many features--for example, there's only a basic search function, no password protection for images, and no advanced image editing or red eye removal--but the company is upfront about what's included and what you are paying for when you upgrade to PicaJet FX.

If you're looking for a basic image editor within a really powerful, fast, and easy image organization system, give PicaJet FX a spin. You may still hate filing your images, but at least you'll have them under control.

--Clare Brandt

PicaJet Photo Manager is focused on organizing photos with some of the fastest processing devices on the market. This product offers fewer editing effects but much greater flexibility and efficiency in organizing. PicaJet has a Quick Start Wizard to sort your existing photos and the interface is arranged well, making navigation simple. Sharing is easy too PicaJet has Free Fotki and Flickr plug-ins that are transparently integrated into the photo management process. And, PicaJet is one of the only photo organizers to offer Send-to-Mobile phone in addition to email.

Feature Set: Arrange and tag photos by Date, File Size, Image Size, Rating, Caption, File Name, Ascending, Descending, Imported Time, Location, Format (JPEG, MP), DPI, Created Date, Modified Date, and EXIF (Camera, Camera Vendor, Camera Model). You can assign icons to each photo for organizing your collection. Use Picajet's standard icon set or generate the icon from the imported image itself. Quickly find any category using intuitive visual cues.

PicaJet's powerful search function makes locating a group of photos or a single shot relatively easy. You can locate photos by: * Without Groups * Date, Rating * Imported Date * Location

Bonus Features * Super Zoom: Smoothly zoom in and out of a picture using just one click. * Hidden Pictures: You may wish to show your photos to friends but need to hide some of the more private ones. PicaJet has a simple process to protect your privacy * Download the program in 27 different languages

Summary: PicaJet is an excellent digital photo management software, however it offers less editing features than its competitors. With its high speed, batching capabilities, and sharing options, consider PicaJet if you are cataloging thousands of photos.

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Add Retro Effects to Your Photos With CameraBag

Is it pure nostalgia, or does it say something about the digital camera when we go out of our way to make our digitized snaps look like they were made using a box Brownie, or Instamatic? CameraBag 2 ($29, 30-day free trial) is a fun way to inject a retro feel into your sterile digital snapshots.

The style effects in Camera Bag range from stylish borders to wacky colorization to vintage looks---all fully adjustable.CameraBag 2 uses a very elegant, artful interface to get you started. Simply upload your JPG, PNG, TIFF, or RAW images individually or in a batch; and click on one of more than twenty pre-loaded styles. CameraBag 2 includes everything from self-explanatory Monochrome to the more esoteric Poolside, Hipster, or Lolo. In case the preview thumbnail isn't enough, CameraBag 2 also displays descriptions of each style---for example, Skater is described as "skinned knees and noisy photos." But the captions are just a cute aside: Since the effect does not destroy your original image, try them all until you find what you like.

Unlike FotoSketcher (free) which is a similar program that focuses on turning your photographs into fine art, sketches, cartoons, and watercolors, CameraBag 2 delves into the lost art of film photography. CameraBag 2 even includes borders to make your image look like it's printed on torn paper, or is from a non-digitized era: 47mm, 35mm, Infititi 50, Insta, Vinyl, 75mm Strip, Slide, and Safety Film. For digital scrapbookers, it's the perfect pairing to a program like Serif's CraftArtist ($60), which will take those nostalgic images and allow you to arrange and embellish them.

CameraBag was originally developed as an iPhone app, but don't get confused with Instagram, a free app for mobile Apple (and Android to be released soon) devices that pays homage to the square formats of Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras: This new version of CameraBag works on your desktop or laptop PC and has been rebuilt from the ground up to be a pretty powerful image editor too. Use CameraBag 22 to crop, rotate, and adjust your image. Each change you make shows up as a tile on the panel at the bottom. If you change your mind you can always return to that particular effect and change or delete it. Effects can also be reordered to achieve a different look.

Once you have the basic style you envisioned, you can use CameraBag 2's easy sliders and curves to tweak your image. The simplicity of CameraBag 2's sliders remind me of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7 ($90), as does the ease of adjusting brightness, color, contrast, crop, exposure, saturation, tint, and vignettes, to name a few areas. CameraBag 2's tools are all in one place and you can use them to control the way your image looks at a beginner's or advanced level. For example, the Contrast tool includes a Brightness Origin slider that changes the point at which you want to make the pixels lighter or darker. Another great feature is the Straighten tool: Use a slider in CameraBag 2 to rotate your image within a non-rotating frame. No more guessing at degrees of rotation, or cropping to square off the image after you've rotated it.

Unfortunately, in CameraBag 2 you cannot select parts of your image, change individual pixels, or print your images: For that level of detail you'll need something akin to Photoshop ($700). Try Serif PhotoPlus X5 ($90), Xara Photo & Graphic Designer, Paint.NET (free), or GIMP (free)

CameraBag 2 will also save combinations of styles and adjustments as Favorites, allowing you to achieve the same effect multiple times; and also includes a batch process to save you time. And CameraBag 2 really proves it's non-destructive---if you accidentally batch process an image you didn't want to change, or overwrite the original, simply switch the changes off.

CameraBag 2 is very easy to use--the 40-second tutorial is testament to how easy--and fun to create your own style. The image manipulation takes some practice to perfect, but the effects are worth it--especially if your images need perking up with a bit of wistful yearning for less digital times.

--Clare Brandt

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Turn Photos Into Fine Art With Dynamic Auto Painter

Dynamic Auto-Painter ($50, free demo with watermarks) lets you take any photograph and turn it into a high-resolution painting that looks like it was drawn by hand. It is not a simple pixel mask or overlay filter: Rather, it uses real brush strokes based on the works of great artists to recreate any photograph as a painting, stroke by stroke.

Dynamic Auto-Painter recreates a photograph as a drawing using real artist brush strokes, yielding astonishing results.I love products like Corel Painter and ArtRage Studio Pro that let you draw your own natural-looking images using nothing but a computer and a mouse or a pen tablet. But as much as I enjoy painting, I am a much better photographer than I am a painter. Dynamic Auto-Painter lets me bridge that gap and present my photographs in ways I never thought I could.

The application ships with over twenty different painting presets, ranging from Aquarel to Chalk to Monet to "Wet-on-wet" paintings with subtle color gradients. The workflow is simple: Drop a photo into the app, pick the preset you like, and dial in your settings: How expressive or realistic you want the output to be, how dry or wet, what should be the brush sizes used, how faithful or impressionistic the output should be, etc. Now hit Start and watch your photo transform into a painting.

The process itself is fascinating to watch. When I first tried the program, I figured my processor was going to crunch some numbers and come up with a somewhat-transformed version of my photo that is supposed to resemble a painting. In other words, I had fairly low expectations. Imagine my surprise when my photo was removed from the canvas, and individual brush strokes began to appear one by one, rapidly building up the image from scratch. It was an eerie experience, almost like watching an invisible artist painting my photo in fast-forward.

Producing an image can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. If you've ever used a 3D design program such as Carrara, you've probably had to wait for a render to finish. Using Dynamic Auto-Painter is a similar experience, only it "renders" a hand-drawn painting instead of a 3D-looking polished image. One big difference is the continuous mode, in which Dynamic Auto-Painter continues rendering endlessly. You decide when to stop once you get the look you were after (sometime fewer brush strokes make for a more expressive painting).

For my first test, I picked the Aquarel preset and changed almost none of the settings. The results were surprisingly good--it really looked like a painting, even when I zoomed in on the 6-megapixel output image (the default output setting--Dynamic Auto-Painter can output images as large as 16 megapixels). At full resolution, the brush strokes become clearly visible and show organic grain and texture.

Because the application redraws the image from scratch rather than overlay individual pixels, you can feed it with a low-resolution image and get high-resolution output. I tried this with a 250-pixel image; results weren't as nice as when I used high-resolution input images, but even this tiny image yielded a beautiful (and clear) 2400-pixel painting.

Having over twenty presets, each with configurable settings, means you can coax an endless variety of art styles from Dynamic Auto-Painter. You can even combine presets: I created a painting using the WoodEtch filter, then left it on the canvas and painted over it with the Aquarel filter, and then painted over the result using yet another filter.

Using Dynamic Auto-Painter is not like drawing artwork from scratch, but it offers amazing results and great customization for very little effort. If you've ever wanted to see your photos through the eyes of a painter, Dynamic Auto-Painter is well worth the download.

--Erez Zukerman

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