PC Magazine - 2009 04.pdf - Libertad Zero - Blog

Best
of the Internet
yourFoNTs
This cool, free font
generator lets you
transform your handwriting
into custom
hand-lettered type. Just
print, fill in, and scan the
template, then upload
it to YourFonts.com to
preview, download, and
install.—Jen Trolio
PluQ
This social planning tool
allows you to engage
your friends or coworkers
in scheduling a
party, lunch, or major
event, free. It gives you
a calendar on which you
can mark certain days
with different colors to
indicate to your friends
whether they’re good
days, preferred days, or
bad days.—Alan Henry
DoorFly
DoorFly is a service that
lets you build a profile
of what you’re looking
for in a home and watch
real estate agents bid
against one another to
work with you on your
housing search. Each
DoorFly agent can create
a custom profile
page.—AH
For more cool Web sites
and handy utilities and
apps, visit PC Mag’s
blog AppScout (www
.appscout.com).
8 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
frontside
ConneCted tr Aveler
Create Great Travel Pics—Free!
Make the most of your point-and-shooter’s output with these free tools
for editing, managing, and sharing your digital images.
If you’re a PCMag reader, it’s a good bet you own a
digital camera that you use heavily on vacation or
business travel. You may not be a digital darkroom
junkie who spends hours tweaking adjustment
layers in Adobe Photoshop, but you want your pictures
to look good, and you want an easy and inviting
way to share them with friends, family, and
colleagues. Luckily, there’s a good selection of free
software out there these days that can do many of
the things Photoshop can.
When choosing one of these free apps, here are
a couple things to consider: How easily does the
photo editor let you transfer pictures from your
digital camera to your computer? How effective
and simple are its tools for editing your photos?
And how easy does it make sharing photos online?
Speaking of putting photos online, Picasa
3 (beta) (top left, l l l l h ) is one of the best
choices out there. This new version keeps what’s
good about the old and adds some new killer capabilities,
such as retouching, face recognition, and
movie editing. The installed software works seamlessly
with your Picasa online galleries, and the
two can even be synced automatically. It makes
working with scanners, webcams, and screen captures
simpler, too.
To organize your pics, Windows live Photo
Gallery (Wave 3) (top right, not rated) has a unique
people-tagging feature and the ability to upload to
Flickr and other services. You can group pictures
based on folders created for each import session
and virtual albums of pictures selected from these.
From there you can organize them by date or tags.
If you want an online-only option, check out
Picnik (bottom left, l l l l m) . This quirky editor
has some super-cool features, such as a button to
automatically fix the blue- or red-eye in pet photos.
Not even Adobe Photoshop Elements can do
that automatically. It also integrates with your
favorite social networking sites like MySpace,
Flickr, and Facebook.
Mac users, of course, have the old reliable,
iPhoto ’08 (bottom right, l l l l m). It is still one of
the best consumer photo-editing options around.
In addition to the blemish remover, flexible sharpness
feature, and noise-reduction filters, this version
has a new “straighten” command that lets you
rotate a photo freely until it’s right. Its division of
your photos into Events also works well. If you
want to share your pictures on Web galleries with
iPhoto, however, you’ll need to spring for the $100a-year
MobileMe service.—Michael Muchmore