Archive for April, 2007

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SnapTouch from www.snaptouch.com

Thursday, April 19th, 2007

This is a rather small utility allowing you to handle your digital photos on your computer. Main features of the program:

  • Importing your photos to a computer. Your photos will be imported from a digital camera, sorted chronologically, renamed and placed on your hard disk.
  • Renaming a group of files. If you don’t like the names of your image files, rename them. SnapTouch also allows you to number photos chronologically.
  • Creation of picture collections. Creation of picture collections. You can handle all the pictures united into the collection at once. At the same time any picture can be included into any number of different collections.
  • Full-screen viewing of all pictures in the collection. You can see all the images with comments and dates.
  • Show image metadata (EXIF). All the information about shooting conditions and parameters is available.
  • Stamping shooting date and comments* on a photo with a single touch, on one photo or on the whole collection at once!
  • Adding comments* to an image file. This feature helps you make images more informative without corrupting them.
  • Framing a photo: cut out part of a shot while preserving its proportions; this is a fantastic opportunity to make your photo more expressive.
  • Resizing your photos to the right size and preserve their proportions is a very useful and effective feature.
  • Rotate photos to view them the right way.
  • Mirror photos. It makes them look unusual.

    SnapTouch features:
    Importing your photos to a computer. Your photos will be imported from a digital camera, sorted chronologically, renamed and placed on your hard disk.
    Renaming a group of files. If you don’t like the names of your image files, rename them. SnapTouch also allows you to number photos chronologically.
    Creation of picture collections. Creation of picture collections. You can handle all the pictures united into the collection at once. At the same time any picture can be included into any number of different collections.
    Full-screen viewing of all pictures in the collection. You can see all the images with comments and dates.
    Show image metadata (EXIF). All the information about shooting conditions and parameters is available.
    Stamping shooting date and comments* on a photo with a single touch, on one photo or on the whole collection at once!
    Adding comments* to an image file. This feature helps you make images more informative without corrupting them.
    Framing a photo: cut out part of a shot while preserving its proportions; this is a fantastic opportunity to make your photo more expressive.

    Resizing your photos to the right size and preserve their proportions is a very useful and effective feature.
    Rotate photos to view them the right way.
    Mirror photos. It makes them look unusual.

    * This feature is applied only to images stored in a special enhanced format that supports additional data. A special marker in the program indicates if your picture has the required format

    The program is available in two versions: commercial, featuring all the capabilities; and freeware which is rendered for evaluation purposes only. You can transform your evaluation copy of the utility into fully operational one at any time by entering a registration key.

    Evaluation copy downloading is avalaible at the Download Link. At the Download Page there are also links for localization of the program interface (language packs). There are language packs for the following languages: English, German, Italian, Ukrainian, Korean, Russian, French, Spanish, Hebrew, and Dutch. How to use language packs is explained here.

    The Main Menu of the application has four options: File, Edit, View and Help.

    The option Help opens a Help popup containing options for structurized on-line Help and on-line Tutorial, as well as links for receiving latest version of the program and on-line registration (for transforming the downloaded evalution copy into fully operational utility), and the standard option About.

    The option File opens File Dialog. This popup contains options for creating a new collection and saving it; for reopening an existing collection; for adding a picture to a collection or the whole folder; for downloading photo images; and, finally, for cancelling the program execution.

    The option Edit opens Edit Dialog which contains editing options for the current picture (for example: Rotate, Crop, Mirror, Sharpen, etc), for adding stamps and comments to pictures, as well as the option Preferences.

    The option View opens View Dialog. It allows standard viewing options such as zooming in and out, fitting images, and handles toolbars.

    On the right in the Main Window of the application there is a toolbar for handling folders and collections on the computer. Under the Main Menu of the application there is the main toolbar. It duplicates many of the functions in the Main Menu. Availability of the toolbars at any moment is managed in the option Toolbars in the View popup.

    Source: snaptouch.com

    • Posted in Image Converting And Editing | No Comments »

    PhotoFiltre from Antonio Da Cruz (FreeWare)

    Thursday, April 19th, 2007

        Although it’s fairly limited in features, PhotoFiltre offers a simple, but elegant user interface and a lot of one-click image adjustments, filters, and effects. There is a built in image explorer panel for visually navigating your file system, basic drawing, painting, retouching and selection tools, and batch processing capabilities.

        PhotoFiltre is a complete image retouching program. It allows you to do simple or advanced adjustments to an image and apply a vast range of filters on it. It is simple and intuitive to use, and has an easy learning curve.

        Downloading of the application is avaliable at the Download page on the developer’s site Photofiltre.free.fr (this hyperlink is for the english version of the site).

        Basically. there are four language versions of the utility for download including English and French. But at the download page there are a number of additional language packs for downloading including German (Deutsch), Russian as well as other languages.

        A strong side of the application is a lot of available predefined selections and photo masks donating for public use by devoted customers :) and available for download. Every PhotoFiltre customer can upload on the site his selections and masks.

        The Main menu of the application has ten options: File, Edit, Image, Selection, Adjust, Filter, View, Tools, Window and ?.
        Under the Main menu there are two taskbars of the program; there is a graphic toolbar at the right edge of the Main window, too.

        The option File opens a File Dialog popup. It has standard options for creating new image (New…) and opening an existing image (Open…); the option Recent files supports a list of recently opened files for re-opening; by the option Revert you can substitute the content of the current image with the last saved version of the image. There are standard options for saving images Save and Save as… as well as closing images Close and Close All. PhotoFiltre supports a number of standard graphic formats such as BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, RLE, Targa, TIFF.
        There are also options for printing the current image Print and acquiring an image from TWAIN-source (Import TWAIN). The option Image properties opens the window which displays information about the current image; The option Exit serves for cancelling program execution and application quitting.

        The option Edit unites editing options. There are standard editing options such as: Undo and Redo changes, Cut, Copy, Paste, Clear, Paste as new image; there is a Paste special option allowing masking for pastes. There are options for clipping selections, rotating and flipping, as well as defining and handling patterns. With the option Purge you can clear the Clipboard and/or histories of editing process.

        The option Image handles the image as a whole. You can change color Mode of the image, Flip vertical and horizontal, Rotate and Skew…, change Image size… and Canvas size…, as well as Fit image… and Duplicate it. There are options for image cropping, too (Crop and Automatic crop). The option Text allows text insertion. There are options for setting transparency to the selected color.
        The option Selection handles selections in the image.
        The option Adjustment of the Main menu deals with adjustments of color balance, hue, shades, contrast and so on.
        The option Filters serves for applying filters to the image. With the Filters popup you can apply predefined filters as well as use custom filters developed by you or some other person (the option PhotoMasque).
        The option View of the Main menu allows zooming in and out, show grid and snap to grid and so on; it enables/disables Filter bar and Tools palette, and Show bounds and shadow.
        The option Tools allows to select a needed tool for work. The Tools popup has also Image manager allowing file copying, moving, renaming and deleting. The option Export as icon… allows saving the image as an icon-file. The option Preferences allows to set preferences to work with the application.
        The option Window contains standard window handling options.
    The option ? stands for Help. The actual on-line help is called with the option Information. The ?-popup has also web-links to the official web-site of the program and the customers forum, as well as standard option About.

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    EMFToEPS (FreeWare)

    Thursday, April 19th, 2007

        This is a simple highly specialized image converter developed for one purpose only: converting images in EMF/WMF (Windows Metafile) format to EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) format. Actual converting of the image is being done using the PostScript driver installed on the user’s PC. Without the PostScript driver the converting of the image format by this application is impossible. The structure of the program is pretty simple.     The Main menu contains four options: File, Edit, Convert and Help. The Pop-up menu File has two options: Open (for selecting and opening EMF/WMF images for converting) and Save As (allowing to save selected pictures under another name). The pop-up menu Edit has standard options for working with a selection list (Cut, Copy, Paste and Delete) and the option Preferences. Actually, the options Cut and Delete perform the same task - they delete selected file from the list for conversion. The option Preferences serves for selecting the PostScript printer (which should be installed earlier, of course). You can also set the resolution of the output image with this option (taking into account capabilities of the installed PostScript driver). The option Convert serves to convert image format of the whole list of image files or the selection of files within that list. During the process of converting the PostScript driver is called; the converted image is shown in the left lower corner of the Preview window of the printer driver. Actually, the destination of the output of the converted image is saving to EPS file, not the printing on paper. The option Help of the Main menu actually contains no help at all - only a pop-up About.
        The distribution package of the application is available at link http://www.projectory.de/emftoeps/emftoeps.zip or through a link in http://www.projectory.de/emftoeps/index.html.
        As a matter of fact there are no installation process, however. The distribution package is a .zip archive containing a ready-for-work copy of the application directory; the executable is EMFToEPS.exe. It’s interesting that the author of the application graciously supplies source files of the program, too. They are contained in the sub-directory ‘source‘.
        The author of the application - Dirk Struve warns that there are some bugs in his applet:

    • Some WMF images can’t be loaded correctly, because the WMF format is not well defined and I don’t now all different versions. Solution: Always save images as EMF.
    • Some WMF images are not converted correctly. (This seems to be a PostScript driver problem) Solution: Try saving images as EMF or WMF images with True Type fonts as curves.
    • Preview of File Dialog sometimes wrong (Bug in Delphi libraries).
    • On some Windows systems, images are not displayed correctly or dieappear.

    But he writes he probably won’t continue work on it.

    Posted in Image Converting And Editing | No Comments »

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