Useful Freeware » Multimedia

Take More Control of Your RAW Conversions

bbetov — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 04:55:15 +0000

RawTherapee is a little gem when comes to converting and editing your RAW photos. It also supports editing of jpg, png and tiff files, but with some features unavailable. Here are the features at a glance:

Exposure and white balance adjustmens;
Highlight recovery – works extremely well;
Shadow/Highlights control;
ICC Based color management;
Color and Luminance noise reduction;
Control thresholds to avoid color clipping in various operations;
Color changes in CIELab space;
Chromatic aberration and vignetting correction;
Rotation/Crop/Resizing/etc.;

In RawTherapee you can also create “postprocessing profiles”, so it is very easy to apply the same settings to multiple photos.

One thing I found it lacking is a batch mode, but with the saved profiles this is not really needed. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the images produced. Very nice program to complement your image processing toolbelt.

An ASCII art generator

bbetov — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 02:53:24 +0000

Have you ever wondered how these pictures, composed by only characters are made? Ascgen dotNET is a software that can help with the task. Basically it works as a converter from a real image and then this image is converted to characters. Very easy and intuitive to use in just a few steps. It works best if you have a relatively high contrast image with distinct shapes, so it is easily recognizable.

The program allows you to select a whole or part of an image, tune the brightness and contrast of the input image as well as fine tune the output (ASCII) image. For the output generation it allows brightness/contrast changes, levels cropping and midpoint selection, dithering level. It offers real time view of the changes, so you see what the output is.

It is portable and only requires you to have the .NET 2.0 framework installed (available via windows update for XP and below and Vista comes with it…). Very interesting and fun to play with…

Easy mp3 manipulation with mp3DirectCut

bbetov — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 04:54:19 +0000

mp3DirectCut is a small and easy to use program can help you edit your mp3s. If you need to normalize the volume, change it, add fade effect, or detect pauses this is a very useful utility to have. You can also cut, paste and delete sections.

The manipulations are very fast and non-destructive. The nicest thing is that nothing is re-encoded, so you don’t loose quality. For the geeks there is also command line interface provided.

Very nice tool to have and strongly recommended!

View and Edit Image Metadata with PhotoME

bbetov — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 20:02:43 +0000

Viewing and manipulating image metadata has some challenges and I’ve been looking for a while for a software to do it nicely and intuitively. The solution I have found is PhotoME. Even though still in beta, the program behaves very stable.

PhotoME has a very functional and easy to use user interface. Here are the most important features:

View and Edit EXIF metadata (2.21 specification);
Support for IPTC;
Reads and displays embedded ICC profiles;
Support for many formats including RAW formats;
Support for Maker Notes tags for most major camera manufacturers;
Import and Export metadata;
Explorer, IE and Firefox integration;

Overall a very useful utility if you work with images.

Generate High Quality HDR Images with Picturenaut

bbetov — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 04:05:42 +0000

Picturenaut is a software to help you generate HDR (High Dynamic Range) images. It allows loading several photos with different exposures and producing one image (16, 32, 64 bit colors) with higher dynamic range (i.e. with bigger difference between the lightest and darkest areas).

The program has a fast and responsive user interface. It allows you to create HDR from multiple images as it supports:

Automatic alignment of the images
Color balance
Automatically determines the camera settings from the EXIF
Exposure correction

There are two built in tone mapping algorithms

Adaptive Logarithmic
Photoreceptor Physiology

, although more can be added via the plugin interface. Several plugins are available and the program seems to do a fine job. Many settings are available to adjust for the tone mapping and they are previewed real-time, so you can get the best results.

Excellent program, which does not need any installation. Just unzip and run!

K-Lite Mega Codec Pack

bbetov — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 03:17:36 +0000

K-Lite Mega Codec Pack is a collection of audio and video codecs, necessary to play (decode) and encode different audio and video formats. It is being updated frequently and it includes the means to play almost any audio and video format I have encountered.

The pack includes Media Player Classic and several tools for diagnostics and video usage. It can also detect problematic codecs and filters already on your system and helps you to remove them.Â It is very easy to install and I believe would suit anyone’s media playing needs.

FastStone Image Viewer

bbetov — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 02:20:35 +0000

FastStone Image Viewer is a fast image viewing and browsing application, supporting most major image file formats as well as excellent RAW support. It has a very nice cropping and resizing interface, including jpeg lossless operations. The full screen view has various options and operations, which show up when you bump the mouse onto an edge of the screen (the different edges give different options).

Here are the feature highlights I like the most:

Fast and responsive image browsing and viewing.
Very nice cropping interface, which supports standard cropping formats, 4×6, 8×10, etc…
JPEG lossless operations including crop – most editors would only do lossy operations, which degrade the quality of the image.
Support for RAW formats.
Dual monitor support – if you have two monitors it can show the browser on one and full screen view on the other.
Support for batch operations to convert, resize, crop, watermark, etc. multiple images at once.
Contact sheet builder

Overall an extremely useful program with many other features I did not mention.

ColorCop color picker

bbetov — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 02:23:12 +0000

ColorCop – is a colorpicker with a variety of options. It contains an eyedropper you drag to the section of the screen you need to get the color from and it will sample from that area. You can choose between 1×1, 3×3 and 5×5 average pixel sampling. The color options allow WebSafe, Detect WebSafe, Reverse, Random, Convert to Grayscale.

A very nice feature is that you can use the mouse wheel to magnify while picking. It has multiple output options like HTML hex, Visual C++, RGB float, Delphi hex, etc.

The application can also be minimized to the system tray.

Create you own web photo gallery with JAlbum

bbetov — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 04:46:29 +0000

JAlbum is an awesome web album generator, that creates web albums from set of digital pictures. At first when I found out it is written in Java, I was skeptical about the speed it will generate the albums with. I was wrong! It is a very nice application with very reasonable speed. Here are the features I liked the most:

Support for Skins

Skins (a.k.a. themes) define the look and feel of your gallery. Extensive Skin Repository is available with skins from multiple authors. Of course you could make your own, but there are plenty to choose from. Several skins are installed “standard” with the program. There is support for skin-related options in the GUI, depending on the skin. My favorite skin BluPlusPlus has myriad of customization options.

Create Album from Folder Structure

It is very nice that JAlbum creates the album structure, based on the input folder structure. This way as your photos are arranged in folders and subfolders anyway it is very easy to create an album out of them. If you need folder thumbnails in the album, make sure to select a photo for a thumbnail in the JAlbum GUI. Also worth mentioning is that when you update an existing album, you could select to only process the files that are new, which considerably speeds up the generation process.

Familiar Explorer-like Interface

The user interface is arranged as Windows Explorer with a folder tree on the left and thumbnail view on the right side. Supports dragging and dropping files. You can easily organize a large number of images.

Image Manipulation

You can set it to extract metadata from the images (IPTC, EXIF, etc.) like camera, aperture, shutter speed, and others. Image filtes can be applied for watermarking, rotating, adding borders, etc.

The program actually supports any kind of file, not just images, so you can include along with the photos PDFs or Word Documents for example.

Web Publishing

JAlbum can directly upload the generated album to an ftp site or use the integrated web server. When uploading to an ftp site and you are updating your album, you can select “Smart Upload” and JAlbum will check which files are already on the server and will not re-upload them.

Here are several of screenshots.

Manage and organize your mp3 collection

bbetov — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 01:37:06 +0000

MP3TAG is an extremely powerful application to edit metadata (ID3 tags, Vorbis comments, etc.) in a variety of audio formats (including mp3, flac, ape, m4a, mp4, m4b, ogg, etc.). It also allows to update tags from filenames and directories, update filenames and directories from tags, updates the whole or parts of the tags.

It also features powerful export with user defined templates, tag import from amazon, freedb, and other online databases. For those interested in other than English languages it supports UTF-8 and Unicode.

Awesome and strongly recommended software for managing the tags of your mp3 collection.

MPEG Audio Collection (a.k.a. MAC) is a powerful companion to MP3TAG. It creates a searchable database from your audio archive, reading file information and metadata (ID3, Vorbis comments, APE, etc.). MAC also supports generating variety of reports, in .txt, .html and .dif formats. Even though it has not been updated since 2003, it is still a worthy utility to have on your computer.