Articles about Content Creation

Relationships are so flighty these days, you don't know who will dump whom next. The defriended person or ex-lover may be out of your life, but how do you get them out of your photos? Or perhaps you have a simpler problem, one I frequently encounter: People get in the way and ruin your special snapshot. How to get rid of them?

There are plenty enough free photo apps out there, but many also are fairly complicated to use or offer too few capabilities. Others provide more features, like Adobe Photoshop Elements, but they're pricey and confounding to newbies. C`mon who really wants to fuss with layers? Enter Superheal, which the folks at MacPhun asked me try, touting its magical -- say isn't that how Apple describes iPad -- photo-editing capabilities, such as removing unwanted objects, or people, from your pics. The app also removes facial blemishes or other unsightly distractions.

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Today, CyberLink released Media Suite 10, which combines eleven of the company’s most powerful applications into a hugely comprehensive multimedia bundle.

PowerDVD 12 is a very capable media player, for instance. Power2Go 8 caters for all your disc burning needs. MediaShow 6 is an excellent media management tool, and PowerDirector 10 is arguably the best consumer video editor available today.

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Web album creator jAlbum has been updated to version 10.6 with a range of bug fixes and feature enhancements. Mac users can now take advantage of a native file chooser that can be used to add folders and images to an album, but there are also numerous tweaks and updates to the Windows and Linux versions of the app to take a look at.

One of the great things about jAlbum is that skins can used to create a completely unique look for your online albums, helping to avoid the risk of looking like everyone else's. This minor update includes an updated version of the Turtle skin, but most of the changes are under the hood. Translators have been hard at work providing updated text in Brazilian Portuguese, German, English, Swedish, French, Spanish, Finnish, Slovak, Polish, Slovenian, Romanian and Korean, and language information is now added to published albums.

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Adobe took the wraps off Creative Suite 6 on Monday, introducing the largest release to date of the content-creation platform. CS6 now includes up to 12 programs and two companion applications, Bridge and Encore, and is available in four editions: Design Standard, Design and Web Premium, Production Premium, and Master Collection.

The CS6 beta is one of the most successful in the company's history, with one million downloads over the past month of availability alone, a record for Adobe. The move was slightly unusual considering the company typically does not offer large-scale betas of its products.

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German software developer Ashampoo has released Ashampoo Photo Commander 10, a major new build of its photo management and editing tool for Windows. Version 10 introduces a number of new tools, features as well as performance improvements.

Ashampoo Photo Commander 10 adds two new photo tools, Repair Pen and Focus Effect Tool, alongside an Effect preview browser, plus adds support for directly uploading photos to three popular social networks.

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When you need to convert, resize or otherwise process a set of images then of course you could work with them all individually. And that will probably deliver the best results as you can tailor your tweaks to whatever each image requires. But if you’ve not just 4 or 5 photos, but 20, 50, 100 or more than you may want to look for a little batch processing assistance from a tool like ImBatch.

Getting started is as easy as dragging and dropping your preferred images onto the program. ImBatch imports all the usual formats -- PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP and so on -- as well as many other file types which you might not expect (PSD, TGA, PCX, TIFF, WDP, HDP and more).

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If you own a computer, there’s a pretty high chance that you also own a digital camera, and this means that you probably have a large number of photos on your hard drive. Unless you have been particularly fastidious in renaming all of your images as you copy them from memory cards, your photo collection may well be a disorganized mess.

Now you can stop hunting for a solution as we’re giving away a free copy of Ashampoo Photo Commander 9 worth $49.99! It’s worth noting that this is a full current product.

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Another busy week of software releases is behind us and, in case you managed to miss some of them, we’ve collected some of the most-compelling titles together into this week’s roundup.

If you spend time installing a lot of the programs we highlight here, you’re going to need a suitable launcher to help you manage them. Winstep Nexus 12.20 is a stylish dock for Windows that provides easy access to all of your apps. The software is perfectly complimented by Winstep Xtreme 12.20, which enables you to completely customize the appearance of your desktop with skins and widgets that can be as adventurous as you like.

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If you’re looking for a video-editing suite that combines a powerful feature set with user-friendly features while taking full advantage of your computer’s hardware to deliver blistering performance, then Cyberlink PowerDirector 9 Ultra64 fits the bill perfectly. While it’s been superseded to some extent by version 10, it’s still an excellent video-editing tool in its own right.

If you’re looking for a fast, powerful and reliable video editor for a price that won’t break the bank, you’ve come to the right place. You can pick up a full version of Cyberlink PowerDirector9 Ultra64 for just $29.95 -- that’s less than a third of its MSRP! But hurry the offer ends at 23:59 Central European Time tonight. That's 6:59 pm EDT, Americans.

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Adobe has released a free public beta of Adobe Photoshop CS6.

And while these are relatively early days -- we don’t have information on pricing, yet, or a firm date for the final release -- it’s already clear that this is going to be a significant upgrade.

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When you need to build a website quickly and easily, then there are plenty of tools that promise they can help. But their reality is often disappointment: low quality templates, inflexible layouts and a general lack of customization options can make it very difficult to build anything credible at all.

Xara Web Designer, fortunately, has always been very different.

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Equipping a PC to handle all your graphics needs can be a complex and expensive business. You’ll need one application to retouch your photos, another for drawing and illustration, and then there’s web graphics, desktop publishing -- and the list goes on.

If you prefer a simple life, though, you could just grab a copy of Xara Xtreme 5. The program can retouch photos; draw everything from simple business logos to complex technical illustrations; design greetings cards, invitations, calendars and more; and even produce web graphics, simple Flash animations or complete websites without worrying about code. And if you take advantage of our giveaway then you can have your copy, worth $79.99, for free.

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It’s official. More than six years after its last stable release, Audacity 2.0 is now available. This open-source, cross-platform audio recording, editing and mixing tool is often bundled with audio hardware devices and has garnered a huge following since it first appeared.

Audacity 2.0 is based on the 1.3.x beta channel, which means those currently running this version of Audacity, the only version to support the latest Windows and OS X operating systems, won’t notice any differences between this and the latest beta release (1.3.14) that appeared in December.

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When you’re looking to capture a moment in time then your first instinct might be to take a still photo. Getting this right is a challenge, though -- it takes skill and great timing to produce quality results.

And while taking a video seems easier, you can often end up with too much information -- shaky camerawork, noise and background clutter -- which only takes away from what should be the real focus of your movie. But now there’s a third option, in Microsoft Research’s newly-released Cliplets, which produces something that’s part still photo, yet also includes motion in just the area that matters to you.

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CyberLink is a company that is synonymous with software that is incredibly powerful yet also incredibly easy to use.  When it comes to the arena of photo editing, there are a number of extremely high-end tools to choose from, and these have a tendency to not only be very complicated to use, but also restrictively expensive. The same cannot be said of CyberLink PhotoDirector, which includes all of the powerful tools you would expect to find in a professional image editing tool, but it is far easier to use than the likes of Adobe Photoshop.

We thought we’d let you in on a deal which will get you the latest PhotoDirector 3, which is retailing with a $149.95 MSRP for only $69.95, saving you a huge 54 percent. Read on.

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