cropping

Picasa for Mac is a free app from Google for importing, editing, organizing, and sharing photos. The first time you launch it, Picasa can quickly search your hard drive (or select folders) for your existing photos, pulling them into the Picasa interface without actually duplicating them and taking up drive space.

Picasa's interface feels un-Mac-like at first, with a nonstandard scroll bar and even slightly fuzzy fonts--but it's still instantly recognizable (and usable) by anyone familiar with iPhoto, thanks to its similar toolbars and three-pane organization with folders and albums. Picasa makes it easy to create slideshows, movies, … Read more

Camera+ helps you take better images with tons of features and a unique tool layout that helps you get the look you want quickly. The app offers several options for making unique-looking images out of photos on your camera roll, or you can snap pictures from within the program using Camera+'s extra tools. When taking a picture, you can use a 5x zoom slider for close-up shots, a stabilizer that automatically takes the shot when your hand is most stable, and a grid overlay so you can line up your shots as straight as possible.

Once you've got … Read more

Picasa for Mac is a free app from Google for importing, editing, organizing, and sharing photos. The first time you launch it, Picasa can quickly search your hard drive (or select folders) for your existing photos, pulling them into the Picasa interface without actually duplicating them and taking up drive space.

Picasa's interface feels un-Mac-like at first, with a nonstandard scroll bar and even slightly fuzzy fonts--but it's still instantly recognizable (and usable) by anyone familiar with iPhoto, with similar toolbars and three-pane organization with folders and albums. Picasa makes it easy to create slideshows, movies, and collages, … Read more

We've seen a lot of screen-capture utilities, and they run the gamut from full-featured image editors to bare-bones applications that take screenshots and don't do much else. ScreenCapture falls into the latter category, although its lack of features makes it lightweight and easy to use.

The program's interface is plain and intuitive, consisting of a small rectangle with three buttons and a text box. One button allows users to capture the entire screen, whereas the Capture Area button lets users select the part of the screen they want to include. This allows users to save time by … Read more

AVLAN Design describes its AVD Graphic Studio as a "mini Photoshop," acknowledging that Adobe's software is the big dog in the CG yard and that the main goal of competitors is to offer Photoshop-like capabilities in less expensive packages that are easier for ordinary folks to use. At this, AVD Graphic Studio succeeds quite well. It's easy to use, it has most of the basic functionality of the pro-level applications, and it's much less expensive than the big packages like Photoshop.

This program will be familiar if you've used Photoshop or similar applications. Its … Read more

Graphics-Toolbox is a graphic design program. We don't have much to say about it, and what there is, isn't good.

Opening Graphics-Toolbox causes the interface to automatically fill the entire screen, forcing you to minimize the program to switch between applications and generating plenty of annoyance as well. One look at the basic interface with its crude and tiny buttons prompted the question, "Where are the drop-down menus?" It appears that there are none; all tools and functions are accessed from the program's palettes, which we couldn't find a way to move. Movable palettes … Read more

It has been said, not least by senior people at Google, that the company dreams of the day when we have Google search implanted in our brains.

Some, mainly human beings, chuckled at the prospect. Perhaps they should stop chuckling.

It must be very difficult to stay interested when you're running the world's largest small ad company, so the appearance of a couple of alien-related doodles suggest that Google's management has finally spaced out.

The latest doodle, which appeared Tuesday, reveals a similar spacecraft to the one that supposedly commemorated the Japanese video game Zero Wing. However, … Read more

Photo Cropper is a basic image-cropping utility. We're not sure how a program could take a function as simple as cropping and make it so complicated, but Photo Cropper has succeeded in doing this.

The program's interface is composed of three large boxes and makes no sense. We were immediately annoyed by the fact that dragging and dropping is the only way for users to get images into the program; there's no File menu. Once we opened an image, it was not immediately obvious how we were to go about cropping it. It turns out that clicking … Read more

Dream Photo Editor allows users to create photo collages with a variety of special effects. Unfortunately, the program's clunky interface and sometimes tacky content hinder its effectiveness.

Upon opening the program, we were met with several error messages right off the bat. This was followed by two nonsensical screens with unlabeled buttons. We clicked a couple of them at random, got a couple more error messages, and then the program opened. Nice. The program's interface is somewhat cluttered and not particularly attractive. The functions aren't bad. Users can start with a blank background or use one of … Read more