Best Photo Editor for Blog – Photoscape

I am using PhotoScape version 3.3 for all my photo editing needs. OK, I admit that I use Photoshop time to time. But after I started using PhotoScape, I rarely use Photoshop because PhotoScape is so fast, simple and yet powerful enough for me to use with blogging.

PhotoScape is a graphic editor that helps me edit and fix digital images easily. Probably this is most helpful when adding addtional texts for descriptions onto the screen captured image. I always use PhotoScape to edit images for my blog.

photoscape2

There are many features in PhotoScape, but especially I like two functions.

1. Editor:
Basic graphic editing tool such as resizing , bright, sharpen, auto level, and other effects. You can easily insert texts and icons also draw lines and shapes easily. You can also insert other pictures as object and easily move them just like object in layers of the PhotoShop. There are other tools for digital pictures such as Red Eye remover and Mosaic effect .

2. Batch Editor:
You can edit multiple files at once. I found it very useful to print the date taken for the hundres’s of the digital pictures before I order the prints. It extracts the information using EXIF data information. Or you can resize or apply specific filtering effect to the multiple pictures at once.

photoscape1
Also it has other useful menus such as GIF animation creator , Color Picker, and filename change tool.

  • This is a freeware to use in Personal and Commercial purposes. Completely free.
  • This software is Microsoft Windows compatible. (Microsoft Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista)
  • Click here fore More ScreenShots

Website: http://www.photoscape.org Download Page

Thank you for visiting Hana & Sarah’s Freeware Blog

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The best video format converter freewares

I have been searching for some good free video format converters for a while. I have actually installed and tried in my desktop PC. The results were astonishing! Some of them do work better than the commercial ones.

Most of them are based on the FFmpeg LGPL software and other open source utilities. FFmpeg is a great piece of software, but it contains only console commands and does not come with any fancy Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). Basically these freewares that I will initroduce act as a the front GUI for FFmpeg. So FFmpeg is not for a casual innocent PC user.

I tried several freewares. Some are worthless to mention and some are very nice. There are the three finalists.

MediaCoder


This is probaly the most powerful video format converter with the every options that you will ever need.
You can drag and drop the source files just like Any Video Converter. And you can play around with the option contol in the lower pane. Note that it shows nice little summery of the output file format and expected size if you click on the ‘Summery’ tab. When you’re done with changing the options, you click on the ‘Start’ Button to execute the conversion. The output file will be created in the same folder where the original source file is located by default.

Here is the description from the website.

MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding in all time and at this moment, it already has millions of users from 170+ countries all over the planet.

And Here are the supported formats ( * supported as input only)

MP3, Vorbis, AAC, AAC+, AAC+v2, MusePack, Speex, AMR, WMA, RealAudio, mp3PRO*
FLAC, WavPack, Monkey’s Audio, OptimFrog, AAC Lossless, TTA, WAV/PCM, Waveform
H.264, XviD, DivX, MPEG 1/2/4, Theora, Flash Video, Dirac, 3ivx*, RealVideo*, Windows Media Video
AVI, MPEG/VOB, Matroska, MP4, PMP, RealMedia*, ASF, Quicktime*, OGM*
CD, DVD, VCD, SVCD, CUESheet*, HTTP*, FTP*, RTSP*, UDP*

When I tried to convert wmv to avi, it did work fine. But when I tried wmv to flv conversion. ffmpeg.exe has crashed and MediaCoder did not respond properly so I had to close it.

  • Interface: 7 of 10
  • Easy to use: 5 of 10
  • Available functions/options: 10 of 10
  • Stability: 6 of 10
  • To Flv conversion: Didn’t work
  • Final Verdict: It’s OK if you want to control all the details of the output video.

(more…)

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