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Time again for Adobe's annual update of its consumer photo- and video-editing applications, Photoshop Elements (Windows | Mac) and Premiere Elements (Windows only). We're up to version 8 now, and while there's no killer must-have new capability--unless you consider automatic sync across multiple computers--the two products still provide solid mass appeal for their respective markets.
As in the past, you can buy the pair together for $149.99, which is a far more attractive buy for video-editing shoppers than Photoshoppers, and in fact the combination makes quite a nice bundle for home videographers. Independently, they're $99.99 each. Tack "Plus" to the name of the product for another $40 and you get an extra 20GB on the otherwise free Photoshop.com membership (along with ongoing new template and tutorial content), which will then cost you $50 annually to renew.
The latter becomes key if you plan to take advantage of one of the nicer new features, the ability to sync your videos, photos, music, projects, and PDF files across multiple systems using Photoshop.com as the hub. (In case you missed it, Photoshop.com rolled out video support last month in preparation for this release of Pre.) While Adobe doesn't make a Plus membership a requirement for doing so, you'll very quickly max out your free 2GB without it.
After allowing the product to languish for a while, with 8 Adobe brings the Mac version of Photoshop Elements up to parity with the Windows version and with the buzzy new features in iPhoto, including face recognition and geotagging/mapping. Unlike iPhoto, however, there's no direct upload to Facebook, though it supports a broader number of services, including Kodak EasyShare Gallery and Smugmug. Annoyingly, those choices are buried as More Options on the Share pane (likely because the interface decision was based on the technology used--implemented via an API rather than core program code--rather than where the user will look for them).
Like most current facial recognition implementations, Adobe's is only moderately accurate. For instance, in many photos it correctly identifies one person, but didn't detect others and thought inanimate objects were faces. The batch detection and labeling where you confirm different faces in groups of selected images is better, but still a little clunky.
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A recent review of Corel Digital Studio 2010 got me close and personal with the consumer-oriented multimedia suite. Corel's studio excelled at providing a consistent, unified look, navigation, and toolset across its applications for editing photos and videos, making movies, burning content, and playing videos. It also copies photos, videos, and music to your mobile device, and can create photo projects like photo books and cards.
All good stuff, but it doesn't come cheap. Multimedia suites like this will put you out about $100. They're worth the price if you frequently use the tools, or if you vastly prefer the convenience and accessibility of a consumer-friendly setup. However, if you don't mind being scrappy, you can cobble together a spread of multimedia tools--your own "suite"--for next to nothing.
Edit and create
FastStone Image Viewer has quick-access editing tools.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)Photo editing, video editing, and making movies are the three largest focal points of multimedia suites like Corel Digital Studio 2010 and Roxio Creator 2010 (unfortunately, no download trial is available for the latter). Google's Picasa is one of my favorite freeware tools for casual users, and one of the closest direct matches to what's offered in a multimedia suite. Its uses are multifarious: organizing your photos and videos into albums, editing images and videos, sharing online, creating projects like collages and movies, and ordering prints.
The image-editing tools are serviceable, with red-eye removal, one-click lighting fixes, cropping and straightening, and finer tools for addressing blemishes and lighting. There are also 12 effects, like sepia tones and soft focus. This contrasts with Picasa's low-grade video editor, which can at least rotate videos and trim them. The movie maker has many more controls, but is basic; it doesn't build in the polished templates of a premium program. Picasa does, however, offer to sell you prints from a choice of providers (choice is good), and can help create a collage.
For standalone photo editing, the freeware applications FastStone Image Viewer, IrfanView, Paint.NET, and GIMP range in features from the accessible to the powerful. Read more about them in this resource guide.
Vista and Windows 7 users can try out Microsft's new Windows Live Movie Maker (review), freeware that can slap photos and video clips into a new movie in seconds. Deeper controls let you tweak transitions, captions, and effects after the automation. Editing tools include splitting, trimming, and applying fade points. As a point of comparison, video editors in these consumer-focused multimedia suites are better-equipped, perhaps with audio-tuning tools and features to adjust video lighting.
Windows Live Movie Maker works on Vista and Windows 7 computers.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)Creating calendars and photo books are a DIY project within your reach if you have an excellent photo printer and a home bookbinding kit. Otherwise, you can spend your energy on the editing and captioning and get a project printed somewhere else. Retail shops, like FedEx Office in the U.S., will print projects. Online photo albums and services like Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Zazzle will also gladly accept your business. The 12-month calendars run from $15 to $20; large photo books are often in the mid-$30 range (online services often charge for shipping). Corel Digital Studio is similarly priced.
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Backing up data is important and should be done often. But remembering and knowing how to do it is a different story.
With this in mind, Memeo--an online digital company that offers a variety of online services such as photo sharing --has released a backup solution for business users that will help keep track of backing up data. Memeo Backup Professional 4.5 is tied to an online console, from which an admin user can remotely view the status of backups of other users. This means that once it's installed on network computers, a single admin can oversee the backup status for the whole business.
The admin user can send the remote user, via e-mail, a license to download or software to install. After that the admin can view the status and then contact the user of a particular computer if something is wrong, or to make sure that the user is backing up data regularly.
Unfortunately, for now, there's not much else the admin user can do. It would be much more helpful if he or she could initiate the backup itself or make the software send a pop-up message to remind the local user to start a backup. Memeo's representatives say that this is along the lines with what the company is working on for future releases of the software.
Other than that, Memeo Backup Professional 4.5 is a standard wizard-driven backup software that offers a variety of backup options, including backing up to an FTP server and to Memeo online storage. Backup to an FTP site offers an option for you to make a personal "online" backup. It also allows for differential backups and backups to local/network folders or removable drives.
Memeo Backup Professional 4.5 works with all versions of Windows 32-bit and 64-bit and is available now for $76 per license, which is rather expensive considering the limited functionality of the online console. However as this online console feature is rather unique and if you are an existing customer of Memeo's online backup service, this software will make a good addition.
If you just want good backup software, I would strongly recommend GFI Backup Home Edition, which, apart from the online console and the tie to Memeo online storage, offers the same options and more, including the ability to back up to an FTP site. Best of all, it is yours for free.
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Every computer user needs a basic text editor for Readme files and simple note taking capabilities--that's why Windows comes with Notepad. But if you want added features like a tabbed interface, search and replace functionality, or extras that help you with coding projects, you need to look for the more full-featured alternatives. The best editors come with numerous features and work great for editing code for Web sites, but also for simply writing quick notes, and pasting excerpts from the Web when aggregating research for a project.
Fortunately, some of the best software in this category is free, but you can also use "Light" versions of paid software and still get most of the useful features.
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NoteTab Light offers a tabbed interface and adds several libraries of premade code bits called "clips" you can access through a pull-down menu on the left side of the interface. These clips can be anything from commonly used code to quick formatting tools available at a click of your mouse. You can also quickly preview your work in your default Web browser from within the interface. NoteTab Light offers a lightweight footprint and is a huge upgrade from the Notepad included with Windows.
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TextPad is another excellent text editor with a "light" version that most users will find offers plenty of features. Like NoteTab, TextPad offers a host of features like a tabbed-interface, and helpful formatting tools for indenting, line numbering, character transposing, and condition-based word wrapping. TextPad will bug you with a nag screen periodically, but most features are available even in this time-unlimited "light" version.
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EditPlus is a text editing tool that's popular with a lot of people because of its ability to use simple FTP commands to get your files online from within the program. Powerful features for Web authors like a built-in Web browser for previews and syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, Perl, C/C++, and many more make this program an excellent alternative. Added handy features like a Windows Explorer-like file directory built-in to the interface and a wealth of commonly used code clips (like NoteTab Light) make this software particularly appealing. EditPlus is a 30-day trial, but with all of its useful features, the $35 price tag is more than worth it.
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Notepad++ is a popular choice among serious code crunchers because it's loaded with useful features and it's completely free. It supports several programming languages, offers syntax highlighting, drag-and-drop functionality, and you can easily launch a preview in IE or Firefox from within the software. As a free option, anybody wanting to see what it's like using a text editor even if it is for making lists or doing Web research has nothing to lose with this excellent text editor. But the popularity of this software among serious coders is definitely warranted, with more than enough features for most projects.
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Anyone who has posted images to a Web site or blog knows that making the image "Internet-friendly" is crucial to fast page-loading times. Similarly, optimizing images for e-mail is important because sending enormous image files through your e-mail client can cause problems for those with slower connection speeds. There are several software tools available to reformat and optimize your images, but I found one recently that's free, easy, and effective.
RIOT (Radical Image Optimization Tool) (Free) for Windows takes the side-by-side interface approach for painless image optimization. Those who have used Adobe ImageReady will immediately recognize the layout of the interface, with the original image on the left and the optimized image on the right. The file size is listed above both the before and after images, so you can tell how your tweaks will affect the end result. You also can zoom in to see how much your changes effect image details.
Use the quality slider to check the optimized image for changes.
(Credit: CNET)If you've ever optimized images before, you know that there are many ways to lower image size without degrading the quality of the image to the human eye. RIOT lets you output to Internet-friendly formats like JPEG, GIF, or PNG, and lets you tweak different settings for each format. For a JPEG image, you are given a slider you can adjust to tweak the quality or you can adjust between four levels of Chroma subsampling (Wikipedia link) to reduce size. GIF and PNG formats allow for color reduction (often the most effective method), which you can choose from a dropdown menu or use a slider. Alternatively, RIOT also lets you choose between two predetermined color quantization algorithms to take the guesswork out of optimizing. Our favorite feature is the "Compress to size" button, which lets you pick your optimal size and RIOT gives you the result. Obviously, you'll need to experiment with this option to get your desired results.
Along with the handy side-by-side optimization features, RIOT offers basic image editing tools like rotation and flip horizontal and vertical. We should point out that RIOT is still in beta, but in all of our tests the software performed without a hitch. One thing we would like to see in future versions is the capability to batch optimize, but as a standalone, free image optimization tool, RIOT is definitely worth checking out.
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Playing with sound files is something not all of us aspire to do in any greater detail than clicking "Buy Now" in iTunes. But this is one of those cool Mac niches that is filled with possibilities you might not have thought about before.
For instance, have you ever wished you could easily record a phone call for a job interview? How about automatically record your favorite radio program from the Internet, even if it's on in the middle of the night? Ambrosia Software's WireTap Studio, recently updated to version 1.0.8, is an inexpensive and efficient way to record and edit pretty much any audio that you can play on your Mac. You can select any combination of software application (Skype, for example) and hardware device (say, your Mac's microphone), and record the output quickly and easily.
WireTap Studio's dynamic formatting means you can check your sound quality on the fly before deciding on a format.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Once you're set up, simply click record, and the end result will be a clean recording of your conversation for your job interview, podcast, custom playlist, or iMovie project.
WireTap Studio offers a complete set of editing tools and lets you export to a variety of compressions and audio formats. Possibly my favorite feature is called LivePreview, which is a button that allows me to hear what my audio will sound like in different formats and levels of compression, before I start recording. This is great when your needs require the file to be under a specific size, yet you want the best quality possible.
Want WireTap to record while you're asleep? Simply setup a time and date for your session and the software does the rest.
(Credit: CNET Networks)WireTap Studio costs $69 for the full version (link above is to 30-day demo), but if you have specific recording needs, this is the perfect software for the job and may be worth the price.
For Ad-Aware's 10th anniversary, Lavasoft has given us an update that includes dramatically faster boot and scan times, as well as an interface refresh and an overhaul of its real-time defenses.
Check out what's new and what's returning in this First Look video from CNET TV.
Photogene lets iPhone users edit photos directly on their phones. (Note, kitty not included.)
(Credit: Daren Darrow/CBS Interactive)The iPhone has many great features, but its camera quality isn't one of them. However, Photogene for the iPhone and iPod Touch is an application that can give photos a little sparkle.
Photogene is an image manipulation tool that lets users crop images, correct color distribution, sharpen, rotate, and mirror images, as well as add special effects. (To view more Photogene features, check out our slide show.)
Apple didn't include image-editing features in its iPhone photo viewer software, so iPhone owners have had to wait for a third party to provide them; Picoli is an alternative. Photogene fills this void by giving people on-the-fly editing capabilities of images before they are copied to a computer. Many iPhone users are always connected to a high-speed data network, such as 3G or Wi-Fi, and upload their images directly from the phone to Web sites or social networks. Now those photos can be enhanced before being viewed by others.
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There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes here at CNET Download.com, and that includes the videos we editors create for the products we find most worthy--or the ones you keep coming back to time and again.
In that vein, we've stuffed this glorious playlist with the the top 10 software videos you watched on our site in 2008. Take a look--you may wind up with a new app you never knew you needed!
(Hint: Click the word "Playlist" to view the whole list or skip ahead.)
Here are the winners:
1. AVG Anti-Virus Free 8
2. Orbit Downloader
3. VirtualDJ
4. Avast Home Edition
5. Firefox 3
6. Ad-Aware 2008
7. FLV Player
8. FrostWire
9. Paint.NET
10. Spybot - Search & Destroy
See more video reviews on Windows, Mac, and Mobile software.
Google's recent release of Picasa 3 (review) introduced a dozen changes to the already popular photo organizer.
A few are small, overdue bridges between the desktop app and Web Albums that greatly impact your work flow, and some are much more ambitious features that substantially extend Picasa's abilities. Almost all of them hit the mark (there is one exception.)
This First Look video takes you on a tour of some of the more salient features of this terrific desktop app for everyday storing, editing, and sharing.
