We don't ride in horse buggies any more, we don't use hurricane lamps to light our kids homework and nobody appears to find that a problem, but for some reason a new technology like the Internet or txt messaging creates all kinds of moral panic and dark warnings that we are on the glide-path to hell unless we revert to our previous behaviours of, well, being couch potatoes.

Fortunately, we are collectively not only smarter than that, we are vastly more adaptable than we are given credit for by the guardians of the status quo. Technology hasn't made us hermits: study [Read more →]

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As more of us use photos in our work, its essential that the expertise to manage them gets embedded in the tools because the vast majority of us wont ever afford a copy or take a course in the high-end software with the coolest capabilities. Which is why I use the "I'm feeling lucky" photo correction on Picasa where I manage my digital photos and where a tool like paint.net comes into its own.

Originally intended as a replacement for the Windows Paint tool that packages with the operating system, it has taken on a life of its own as a graphics and photo editor.

Features
Every feature and user interface element was designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable without assistance. ... The tabs display a live thumbnail of the image instead of a text description. This makes navigation very simple and fast.

Layers
Usually only found on expensive or complicated professional software, layers form the basis for a rich image composition experience. You may think of them as a stack of transparency slides that, when viewed together at the same time, form one image.

Active Online Community
Paint.NET has an online forum with a friendly, passionate, and ever-expanding community with a growing list of tutorials and plugins.

Special Effects
Many special effects are included for enhancing and perfecting your images. Everything from blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise, and embossing are included. Also a 3D Rotate/Zoom effect that makes it very easy to add perspective and tilting.

Adjustments are also included which help you tweak an image's brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, curves, and levels. You can also convert an image to black and white, or sepia-toned.

Graphics Tools
Paint.NET includes simple tools for drawing, filling and altering shapes. Other tools include the Magic Wand for selecting regions of similar color, and the Clone Stamp for copying or erasing portions of an image. There is also a simple text editor, a tool for zooming, and a Recolor tool.

Unlimited History
Everybody makes mistakes, and everybody changes their mind. To accommodate this, every action you perform on an image is recorded in the History window and may be undone. Once you've undone an action, you can also redo it. The length of the history is only limited by available disk space.

Free!

I've worked with an old copy of Paintshop Pro for years and it does all these things, but every time I shift to a new computer, less frequently these days I admit, I have to find the original discs, PLUS the upgrade download to restore it to what I expect to find.

This looks like a reasonable replacement. If you use it, have an alternative, or decide to try, let me know how it goes.

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Every time a major story breaks outside the ability of the corporate media to cover it, the quality of the coverage seems to change by orders of magnitude both in quality and quantity. Its first glimemrs occurred during the attack on the World Trade centre in 2001, but it didn't really hit its stridfe until about 2007 with the London underground attacks where journalists were outside the cordon but people with cellphones, and their cameras, were inside the cordon and rpeorting, flickr-ing, blogging, txting reports from the front lines. Since then we have been inside the Mumbai attack and now we also have twitter as a tool of civil disobedience.

The events of the last 10 days in Iran are a perfect example of how this new media thing works and the issues that arise from mass journalism, especially those of credibility and merging of duplicate reports.

One of the best thinkers on the future of journalism and the media is Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine who offers this take on Adding value in the new news ecosystem [Read more →]

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When photos were purely private artefacts, we kept them in boxes and rarely looked at them, or a few in albums and most of them with little or no metadata like date, location and names of people shown.

Not any more. We take photos with practically every digital tool we have and share them instantly and constantly, often with people we have never heard of but who can sometimes identify other people in them, or comment in other ways and add them to their own collections in online tools like Flickr.

They are helping to create communities of people connected by their responses to images; and some organisations are using those responses to connect those commjunities to their own objectives. Like the Red cross. via Red Cross builds communities with Flickr.

[Read more →]

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When I remember to take my camera with me, about half the time, I find myself using it for thiongs other than taking pics of friends and landscape. I especially use it for capturing text that strikes me as interesting, saving a lot of time in transcription, but also capturing some of the style and context that would need silly numbers of words to convey.

Here are some samples from the last few years. But compared to these guys, I'm a rank amateur.  via Using the Hell out of your Digital Camera.

Got any others you use it for? Comments please.

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