Photo

Forget about paying street vendor prices for the magazine covers with your face on them like you see in Times Square or other tourist haunts. You can create them yourself at MagMyPic, which has realistic fake magazine covers ready for you to grace them with your uploaded image.

After you upload your photo you can choose from several magazine covers such as People, Vogue, National Geographic, well you get the picture. After you select the cover size (small or medium), you’re done and you can post it to a slew of your favorite sites like Facebook, Blogger, etc. or just grab the code and embed on your website. No sign-in required.

MagMyPic is an affiliate marketing campaign to help sell actual magazines, as in those print kind. A link to purchase magazine subscriptions is available, but we bet you’ll just bypass that.

[via Bloggers Blog Twitter feed]

Yotophoto is a search engine specifically for free-to-use images. Most of the images it indexes have been released under Creative Commons, GNU FDL, or similar licenses, and a smaller percentage are in the public domain. This means you can use any images indexed by Yotophoto without feeling subversive. And if you don’t want to go to the trouble of visiting the Yotophoto web site, there’s a search plug-in available for Firefox.

Now, are you ready for the really cool part? Yotophoto allows you to search by color. Need an image that matches your site’s color scheme? Either use the Javascript color picker to choose from a palette of over 16 million colors, or enter a 6-digit hex code. Yotophoto will find images containing the color you specified. For example, here’s a selection of images that match Yotophoto’s logo.

Smugmug may be a perennial also-ran in the photo-sharing space,

but the service is trying to stay ahead of the curve by offering its

members more customization features. After database glitches brought the service down

for several hours earlier today, smugmug unveiled a massive CSS

overhaul, which lets members customize virtually every aspect of their

photo galleries. Unfortunately, the service’s own default style still

sports a hideous day-glo-on-black look, but at least it’s easier to

get rid of it — if you’re willing to pay a price. Smugmug limits

customization to its "Power" and "Pro" users, who pay $49.95 and $99.95

a year, respectively. "Standard" customers are stuck in day-glo world

for their $29.95 a year. I still like smugmug, and I think $49.95 is a

reasonable price for unlimited uploads and downloads, along with full

customization. But I think they really should offer a free tier — and

hire a new designer — if they want to compete more aggressively in this

space.

If you’re building a Photoshop file with multiple masked layers and would like to make a new mask from those masks, I found a tip at PhotoshopSupport.com that’s just for you. From the way the tip’s written, however, it sounds like this might only work with CS2 since the term "layer groups" (instead of layer sets) is used. If anyone tries this with another version, please inform the rest of the class.

Basically, all you need to do is group a set of layers that are masked by using the Layer > Group Layers command. Then you can simply hit the Add a Layer Mask button at the bottom of the layers palette to mask the masks.

Like the pic? London-based illustrator Steve Caplin makes an average of 12 images like this a week for various publications, reviews software for MacUser Magazine and has written/co-written 5 books. Fortunately, Steve put together a great walk-through tutorial in which he teaches you the tips and techniques used to build this image in Photoshop. On the second page there’s an interview with Steve where he talks about his work, what tools he uses and even some hints for working with clients - invaluable advise when you can come across it.

[via PhotoshopSupport.com]

Photo management software for Windows makes us weep. For most people, photo management consists of loading the software (and drivers) that came from the camera manufacturer. So you’ve got a Nikon camera, and the photo management software is really different from your significant other’s Kodak software.

It looks different. It acts different. It’s easier to set up some ways, or more inflexible in others. It might even be installing extraneous applications on your machine you weren’t expecting.

Linux, as you’ve probably guessed, handles cameras a little differently. Camera drivers — many different camera drivers — are handled by gphoto2 and its libraries. Your pictures are downloaded and organized through photo management software, which runs on top of the gphoto2 drivers. (As a side note, gphoto2 can also be used to download pictures from the command line.)

Your Nikon, your mom’s Kodak, and your brother’s Sony will all use the same photo management program on your Linux machine. Now that’s a little less complicated.

Today we’re taking a look at the F-Spot photo manager.There are several (really good) photo managers available for Linux. F-Spot is associated with the GNOME desktop, primarily. KDE has DigiKam, which is an excellent program with very similar functionality to F-Spot. There is even a version of Google’s Picasa that works in Linux (through emulation).

F-Spot is full-featured, yet clean and fairly straightforward to use. Photos can be arranged by date or folders, and can be tagged for quick retrieval. The application is also capable of performing some common photo editing tasks, such as red-eye reduction, color adjustments, cropping and angle adjustments. It also uses something the developers call “versions.” When a picture is opened for editing, the original is saved, and a new version receives the edits. Subsequent edits are done to the new version, so that the original picture remains untouched. This is a nice feature for those of us that don’t have mad editing skills.

F-Spot features the ability to export photos to Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, 23hq and to burn to CD directly from the application. It also supports uploading to web galleries should your home page support it.

F-Spot typically stores and looks for photos in the Photos directory. If you already have photos on your hard drive located in other directories, it is possible to import them by clicking the import button, and selecting the appropriate directories. The images are then copied into the Photos directory (and also remain in their original directory.) Through Edit>Preferences, you can also set F-Spot to store newly imported photos in a directory other than Photos.

Of course, the real question for most people is how exactly F-Spot interacts with their camera. As long as gphoto2 supports your camera drivers, the process we’re going to show should be quite similar to what will happen when you plug in your own camera.

Fire up F-Spot (we’re guessing you have already, if you’re poking around importing pictures). Go ahead and plug in your camera. F-Spot can find cameras via USB and PTP connections. If your camera is like ours, and supports both, try each method. You might get lucky and they’ll both work. We found, however, that PTP was a lot more reliable (not just with F-Spot, but also with DigiKam).

Click the import button, and turn on your camera. Select your connection mode on your camera, if it makes you jump through that extra hoop (our Panasonic Lumix makes us do this.)

You’ll notice a few things happening, all at once. Don’t freak out. Chances are good your desktop environment will pop up a message that a camera was detected and ask you want you want to do with the photos. You don’t want your desktop environment to do anything, at this point, so feel free to cancel out and ignore this little window.

Nearly simultaneously, you’ll find (taa daa!) that F-Spot has auto-detected your camera. If it doesn’t auto-detect, you may want to try either another connection mode (if possible) or see if there’s a similar driver gphoto2 can safely substitute for your camera.

You may also notice that F-Spot is not reporting your camera model correctly. Our Panasonic is a DMC-FZ7, not an FZ20. This is not a cause for concern (gphoto2 found a workable driver substitute for us).

Here you can choose to copy your files to the Photos folder. You can also bulk attach tags, if you want. For now, though just select your camera and click import.

You’ll then be presented with all the photos on your camera. You can add tags here as well, as a group or individually. Clicking copy will import them into the F-Spot application.

When the download is complete, you’ll be brought back to F-Spot’s main browse screen. There, the really hard part is done. That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?

For our next trick, we’ll try a simple edit. To select the photo we want to edit, we click on it and (creatively) press the edit button.

The editing options appear on the bottom of the window. Since this appears to be a big black blob in a darkly framed picture, we’re going to try to do some color adjustments.

Up comes the hue window where we can try to make things a bit brighter. What this doesn’t show is that the photo, visible behind the hue window, lightens and adjusts in real time as we pull the handles.

Happy with what we’ve got? We now have the modified version of the original picture (remember the versions we told you about earlier?). Simply pulling down the “Version’ menu on the left side of the screen and selecting “original” can bring us back to our base photo.

Two points need to be made perfectly clear with F-Spot (or any other photo manager). The interface is the same, regardless of camera. This makes things easier to adjust to and work with.

The second thing? It’s not Photoshop. It’s not even GIMP. If you’re really into high end digital photography, the editing tools are not going to get you very far. We’re willing to bet, though, that most casual users won’t care. We’re willing to bet a large percentage of readers resize, lighten, sharpen and crop their photos, upload them to Flickr or Picasa, and call it done.

F-Spot does this quite nicely. We’d recommend giving it a try, especially if you use a non-KDE environment. If KDE is more your style, we’d advise trying DigiKam first.

The latest version of F-Spot is currently 0.4.2, and F-Spot is likely available for easy install through your distribution’s official repositories. It can also be downloaded from the project’s homepage.

When Yahoo! snubbed Microsoft’s first buyout offer last week, no one was happier than the 3,000-plus members of a Flickr photo pool called “Microsoft: Keep Your Evil Grubby Hands Off Of Our Flickr.” The group has posted a collection of funny images that protest Microsoft’s attempts to buy Yahoo!, which currently owns Flickr. Their photos range from clever to cynical to downright obscene.

Some of the running themes in the pool include mashups of the Microsoft and Flickr logos, parody Windows dialog boxes, and pictures of Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates gloating about their impending domination of the photo-sharing market. It’s easy to see from the photos that a lot of users aren’t happy, but we also found some serious discussion in the comments about how Microsoft might change Flickr.

Some users seem to have posted their funny photos so they can laugh to keep from crying. The pictures are cross-posted to another group called “If Microsoft Acquires Flickr [Yahoo] I’m Committing Suicide.” Microsoft should be on notice that it’s about to put its evil grubby hands on some potential new customers who take photo sharing very seriously.

Yes, you read the title line correctly. Outsync is a small, simple application that imports photos, and only photos, of your contacts from your Facebook account into Outlook.

With Outsync, you can easily replace old photos in your Outlook contacts list with shiny new pictures from Facebook, or add pictures to those contacts who previously had no image. Those shiny new pictures are then synced to your Windows Mobile device via Exchange server or ActiveSync, and displayed every time you make a call (or anytime your contacts are used).

The download is tiny, and setup is flawless. Of course it would be nice if Outsync would copy information such as email addresses or phone numbers, but apparently that kind of activity might get you banned from Facebook. Though some would use Outsync for good, others would use it for evil: i.e., downloading everyone’s email address in order to bury them under a spam avalanche.

OutSync is compatible with Windows XP, Vista and Server 2003, and requires Outlook 2003 or 2007.

[via gHacks.net]

We can think of many reasons why it’d be a good idea to password protect an image, and, whatever your reason may be (patent pictures, blueprints of the Death Star, or maybe a couple naughty shots of the wife), sometimes it’s best that others don’t find out. To solve this problem, we present Lockimage.

It consists of just one file and doesn’t need to be installed. Lockimage will convert any picture into a “password protected executable,” which means the file will open on any PC without the Lockimage program. This means, however, the modified file is no longer considered an image file, so this may not be the right solution for some.

Lockimage is similar to Locknote, which uses a similar method of locking files. It’s also a Windows-only application, and it’s probably best to use this against non-hacker types. With the program being open-source, the recipe isn’t exactly a secret.

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

Over at Berryreview.com, they’ve had a chance to scope out the new Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Blackberry. While the older “version” of Picasa for Blackberry was just a glorified landing page, this new application has plans to do a lot more:

• Add any picture to the correct album, add tags, or adjust its size prior to uploading
• Upload any picture to Picasa Web Albums
• If you’re using a BlackBerry smartphone with GPS capabilities you can also geotag images so that people who look at your pictures can tell where they’re taken. (Of course, it will only list the location at which the photo was uploaded, so if you upload a picture of that alien aircraft you snapped at Area 51 after you get home to Kennebunkport, your friends will think your photo is a fraud). To properly geotag an image (and avoid disbelief), you should complete the uploading process from the same location the picture was taken.

No release date as of yet, but if you want to be the first to know, you can become a member of the Blackberry Owners Lounge, and they’ll let you know as soon as Picasa for Blackberry is available.

[Via Berryreview.com]