Description: Looxis Faceworx is a free 3D modeling program that can construct a textured 3D model of a person’s head out of two 2D photos (one from the front, "mugshot" style, and the other profile style from the side).

With this program you can create a modeled 3D head and then export it as an .OBJ file for use in other 3D modeling software such as Sketchup or Blender. As a starting point you will need two well light photographs of the subject whose head you want to model, and, once imported into Looxis Faceworx, the process will require a degree of manual intervention on your part to best map your subject’s phase/features onto the 3D model. Here are more notes on this program:

• The learning curve: is very shallow. Just go to help then video tutorial and you will know everything that you need to know within 5 minutes. The program is very easy to use and come to grips with.
• How it works: once you have the images, you will have to manipulate a line/point structure manually in order to best fit it around the face in the photographs.What you need to know here is that there are different levels of detail that you can work with: you can tell the program to give you more points or less points to manipulate.
• More tips: make it simple by deactivating the line/points structures that you are not working with instead of having them be displayed on screens. Zoom into the images when working with them for best accuracy (with the mouse wheel). Start with as little points as possible then make it more detailed afterwards; the better you "fit" these points around the head, the better the result will be. Deactivate the "blend zone" to begin with and deal with it at the very end.
• The user interface: is very straightforward. Three different windows display your subject’s frontal image, profile image, and 3D model of the head. What is nice about this program is that since it only does one thing - maps images to a 3D head - there is a limited set of tools that you need to use and come to grips with.
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Description: TwinsVisions is a free image viewer that uses a so-called “3D image management system” to navigate and manage image collections. It combines this with image editing and online image sharing functions, as well as Windows context menu integration.

If you are wondering what a “3D image management system” is, in simple terms it is a way to view your individual image folders such that they are represented by panels (called “image boards”) that you can view in 3D, zoom around and in and out of, etc. This makes for an interesting experience, but one that takes a little bit of getting accustomed to, and whether ultimately it proves significantly more useful than, well, a non-3D interface IMHO remains an open question.

Regardless, there are three things that I can report about this program that I am sure about: (1) the 3D folder management function is quite interesting to work with, (2) the editing functions offered by this program are excellent, and (3) there are a number of little functionalities and tools that this program offers that are extremely useful, such as the context menu integration and the use of an “image basket” for images that you want to work with. Here are more notes on this program:

• The 3D folder management: (I mean “image board management”) interface is visually pleasing and creates a definite coolness factor. A number of hotkey+mouse combinations enable you to maneuver and navigate the camera and zoom in and out, and there are a number of pre-defined ways you can choose from in terms of how you want the program to arrange the image boards. The only criticism I have in this regard is that the controls are somewhat too mouse scroll wheel reliant, and for someone like myself who uses a laptop I would have liked the option to navigate with the arrow keys as well.
• Image editing: the image editing component of this program is extremely cool. It covers (a) typical functions such as resizing, cropping, and flipping, (b) image “fixes” such as fixing red eye, auto color levels, noise removal, etc, and (c) offers a number of useful effects, such as embossing, pixellization, distortion, re-colorization, etc. What I like about it is that you can select a part of the image and apply the effects you like only to that part (so, for example, only pixellate the part of the image you would like to conceal, etc).
• Image sharing: at the moment this might be more accurately be called Flickr integration, as Flickr is the only image sharing services that is supported. However, you can manage multiple Flickr accounts and manage Flickr tags, comments, and notes, etc. from within the program itself.
• Context menu integration: one of my favorite components. You can peform a wide range of functions straight from the context menu: upload to Flickr, resize, rotate, flip, apply a fix, etc. There’s also a “preview” function which launches an interesting, non-3D version of the program that enables you to quickly work with the image.
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Description: Panoye is a community-driven photo sharing site with a twist: all uploaded images are panoramic, 360° views, and all of them are geo-tagged to show you exactly where the photos were taken on a map of the earth.

I must admit to a certain fondness for panoramic photos and 360° views, which is why I found this site so interesting. Aside from the (decidedly brilliant) concept, and the fact that you need to scroll through the image and/or click into it and drag it around to view it, Panoye feels and behaves much like other photo sharing sites such as Flickr: users can rate and leave comments on images or leave tags that point to interesting features or other information within the images.

Images that you like are easily downloadable (click "show image" and the right-click save background as). You can also subscribe to the site’s RSS feed to be instantly informed of new image uploads and/or subscribe to your favorite Photographers’ RSS feeds and be notified when new images by them become available.

Whats even cooler is that for any image that’s uploaded on Panoye (whether you uploaded it yourself or not) you can obtain a code that enables you to embed it on your site. Check out the following Panorama from Venice, Italy.
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Description: This posting will describe how to change the default image editor used by Windows using a small freeware program called Imgeditor, and will propose 5 freeware image editing programs that you can use instead (Photoscape, GIMP, Paint.Net, Image, and I.Mage).

I was recently testing a screenshot capture program that uses the default Windows image editing program (Microsoft Paint) to edit screenshots once they are captured. This lead to two realizations:

1. I already knew MS Paint does not meet my needs, but now I decided to figure out how to change the default editor to point to one of the many fantastic freeware bitmap editing programs that are out there.
2. It also occurred to me that the “edit” entry for image filetypes in the explorer context menu (see screenshot above) is wasted space, and that changing it to point to a decent image editor is a fantastic idea.

I therefore set out and did a search on Google; and found that changing the default image editor involves editing a couple of values in the registry - or you can have a freeware program called Imgeditor do it for you. (Download it here).

Imgeditor is a very straightforward program that you unzip and run and does not need to be installed. Simply select the image types then point it to the program you would like to use as your default editor. Note that you could use the program to revert back to the default Windows image editing settings.

Now you can simply right click on an image file ans select edit in the context menu and the image will be loaded into your image editor of choice!

If you are looking for good image editing programs, here are five freeware recommendations:
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Description: PhotoMesa is a free tool for managing image libraries. Dubbed a "zoomable image browser", it employs an innovative method for browsing a large number of images by zooming in and out of folders in a sort of "bird’s eye view". It also offers the ability to browse image collections by folder, category, people, year, and month, and for adding searchable tags and captions stored within the image files themselves using the IPTC standard.

This program was apparently developed based on research that was done in the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab, and the end result is a very intuitive way of browsing image libraries. What you will immediately notice when you first start using this program is its unique (and quite pleasing) way of scrolling through a large number of images in "zoom mode" (I will attempt a description of this below, but if you want to get a sense of this see the video at the bottom of this review). Here are more notes on this program:

• Zoom mode: by default, Photomesa will scan the folders that you tell it to and generate groups of rectangles that represent your folder tree visually. What is nice about this representation is that (a) it serves to take maximum advantage of your available screen space, and (b) it allows you a bird’s-eye-view (or satellite-eye view more like) which allows you to easily browse your entire image collection in a very intuitive way.
• Scroll mode: is a normal interface of viewing folders or groups sequentially employed in most programs (such as Picasa). This is made available in case you prefer a conventional way of working with folders/groups. This is also a better interface when you need to see all images within folders, as zoom mode uses "representative" images for most folders until you zoom into it.
• Interacting with the program: the system of interaction under zoom mode is well thought out, and takes a very short time to get the hang of it. Left or right clicking over any rectangle zooms in and out of it, respectively. Each rectangle will only display a representative number of thumbnails, but once zoomed into will display all the images within using very small thumbnails (this depends on the program window size and the number of images within). Hovering on any thumbnail produces a larger floating preview of the image, which is very useful. You can perform operations on the images by selecting one or more images (using CTRL or Shift) and using a number of options in the context menu (rotating, captioning, making an image a "favorite", etc).
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Description: in this posting I present 5 of my favorite wallpaper images, all of which feature a single, lonely tee typically surrounded by an expansive sky and/or field.

There is an image that I’ve been using as my wallpaper for a very long time of a single, lone tree in a brown field, illuminated by the brilliant orange of a sunset. I am not sure where I downloaded it, but it was featured in numerous screenshots that I have put up on Freewaregenius. This is probably my favorite wallpaper image ever, and works really well as a wallpaper because of the large single-color areas without much activity. Thankfully, I was able to find more information on this image by searching for its filename on Google, and was able to trace the photographer Michal Karcz’s page on deviantART (more nice photography there, including variations the tree theme). You can download a hi-res version of this wallpaper image here. (Note: the images that open when clicking on the thumbnails have all been degraded, but I am providing links to pages where you can find hi-res versions for all of these).

Now I usually do not put much effort into seeking wallpaper images, and am in fact inclined to use the original Windows XP “Bliss” wallpaper that is the default provided by Microsoft. However, every once in a while I will browse image/wallpaper sites out of curiosity. Thus I was browsing an image site and downloaded a handful of images, my favorite of which, once again, depicted a single lone tree surrounded by a vast expanse of sky and field. Unfortunatley this took place some time ago and I can no longer trace back what the site was that it came from, but you can download this image here.
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Description: Desktop Earth is an interactive wallpaper generator that presents an accurate, constantly changing representation of the earth as it would be seen from space at that precise moment on your desktop wallpaper.

Not all Wallpaper images are created equal, but this one has to be one of the coolest. Desktop Earth presents a changing image of the globe and displays shadows on lights based on the current time. It also retrieves a semi-realtime cloud image from the Internet in order to generate an accurate depiction of what the earth would look like at the very moment you are looking at it (more or less) if you were looking at it from space. More notes on this:

• Imagery: the globe used in Desktop Earth uses imagery based on NASA’s Blue Marble: Next Generation and Earth’s City Lights. Images are created from high-resolution textures (2560×1280) and should work well on any display.
• Time zone: the time zone (and therefore the progression of shadows and lights) can be set to update every 1, 5, 15 or 60 minutes.
• Clouds: Desktop Earth can update its cloud representations from the internet every 3, 6, 12, or 24 hours, depending on what you choose in the settings. These clouds are generated for the Xplanet project and are actually image mosaics generated from weather satellite images (therefore not 100% accurate, but close). You can control the degree of desired cloud cover thickness in the settings.
• Night view: can be generated in 5 different ways (city lights, abundant city lights, moonlit surface, simple shadows, or no night imager). All of these look fantastic, but my favorite is abundant city lights (with moonlit surface coming at a very close second).
• Different months: the program uses a different image of the globe for each different month, in order to accurately simulate snow and foliage changes. (This is the kind of attention to detail that just blows me away).
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Description: Flickvision is a web site that displays pictures being uploaded to Flickr and the location they are being uploaded from on a map of the world in real time.

It’s been just over a week since I wrote about Fotoree, a recommendation engine that makes it easy to find images you like on Flickr, and I thought I would follow that posting up with this one. Flickvision is a very simple concept: a map of the world is displayed on-which tooltips appear showing images that were just uploaded to Flickr and pointing to the geographic location on the map that this event took place. Each photo is displayed for about 3 seconds before moving to the next one, and if you click on the name of the Flickr user and you will be taken to that person’s page on Flickr (where you can also see/download the image).

There are two versions of Flickrvision; a 3D rotating globe or a “classic” view that uses a 2D Google maps style representation of the world. You can view the 3D globe fullscreen as well as rotate it and or zoom in and out, which is very cool, but believe it or not I kind of prefer the 2D version.

There isn’t really any practical use to this aside from the mere voyeristic pleasure of observing the pictures that random people from all over the world are taking and uploading, but I found that interesting enough in itself to want to mention it here. Check it out for yourself.

[Via DownloadSquad].
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Description: Photoree is a web-based recommendation engine for images. It can learn what kind of images that the user likes by serving images and asking for a simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down or no rating, and can use this information to point the user to images/photographs that it thinks he/she will like. It is based on a database of more than 1 million indexed images.

Do you enjoy good photography? Maybe you frequently find yourself downloading images or wallpaper backgrounds because of their artistic merit? If so then you probably visit Flickr and you probably are aware of the fantastic photography that can be found there. The only problem is that it can be quite time consuming to surf Flickr or sites like it in order to find the best stuff, and this is where Photoree, a recommendation engine for images and photographs, can be very useful. To quote the site: “Photoree is to Photos what Last.FM is to music and StumbleUpon to websites”. Here are more notes on this web service:

• The image database: the site states that Photoree has a database of more than 1 million images. All the images seem to share 2 characteristics (a) they all originate from Flickr, and (b) they are all under the Creative Commons license. Oh, and (c) they are mostly very good. All images are linked to their page on Flickr, where you can find out more information if you need to.
• Rating: Photoree will serve images to you based on what it learned from your previous ratings. Images which you “thumbs up” will be saved in your favorites. Curiously, once you rate an image up or down Photoree will let you skip rating a couple of images but will force you to make a judgment call after that, which feels weird at times but certainly makes the process more efficient.
• Your favorites: you can view these as pages of thumbnails in a grid, and can either share them with everyone, with people who have registered with Photoree only, with your contacts only, or just yourself. Note that you can add people as contacts very easily and at will.
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Description: Noiseware CE (Community Edition) is a free program that can remove or greatly reduce noise from digital images while keeping the details. It is different from most image processing software that employ simple methods such as median filters in that it employs a sophisticated yet fast algorithm that uses the “adaptive noise profile capability” and sharpening function to deliver excellent and quick results.

Image noise is a kind of grainy look/degradation that can be found on images which significantly reduces their quality, and is often the result of under-exposure (i.e. not enough light) when the image is taken. The good news is: NoisewareCE can deal with this problem extremely well.

There has been a proliferation of programs that manipulate, fix, sharpen, focus, and perform many other such optimizations and enhancements to images, so much so that when I come across image-fixing programs these days I largely gloss over them unless they have something that stands out. I am not an expert on image filters and this is somewhat unfamiliar territory, but what drew me to this program was (a) the promise of a sophisticated filtering technology that is apart from what you usually get with most programs, and (b) the image gallery of results displayed on the developer’s website (see here, and here; click on the before and after tags under each picture for a comparison). Also see a couple of before-and-afters that I made myself.

More info on this program:

• How to use: simply load your image and process. Typically the only decision you will need to make is to choose a pre-defined filter from the filters list. Once processed you can save the resulting image, by default it will save under the same name and append “_filtered” to the name.
• Filter pre-sets: include default, landscape, night scene, portrait, film grain effect, and a handful of others. If you do not feel like messing with these, go with the default filter. (Note: the paid version offers the ability to tweak and save custom filters).
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Description: “Sendto Flickr” is a free Windows explorer extension that allows you to upload images to Flickr through the right-click “send-to” menu.

If you’re a Flickr user you might already know that there are a number of desktop-based programs that can be used to upload photos to the photo sharing site; “Sendto Flickr” is another uploading option which, as the name implies, allows you to upload straight from the Windows “send-to” context menu. More notes on this one:

• Upload from anywhere: including network drives, removable drives, flash cards, memory cards, etc.
• Batch uploading: simply select multiple images and right click to upload. Files will be uploaded sequentially and previewed as they are uploaded.
• No image or metadata editing: unlike some of the other Flickr uploaders that do this, this one is just about 1-click uploading; you do not need to enter photo details.
• Authorization: will require that you authorize it to use the Flickr API to access your account. Will take you through the steps after installation. You will not need to enter account details every time you upload.

Wish list (or how this program can be even better)
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Description: ComicRack is a free comic ebook reader for CBZ, ZIP, CBR, RAR, TAR and PDF formats. It is designed as a full-feature reader with bells and whistles as well as being a manager for your library of comic ebooks and metadata. It can also convert ebooks to other ebook formats.

If you don’t know what they are, comic-book format ebooks are typically images files that are compressed into archives and displayed in a reader according to the naming sequence of the individual images (more info on comic book formats here). Comic readers are usually geared towards displaying pages/images full screen, rotating and scrolling them for the best reading experience.

ComicRack is a worthy replacement for CDisplay, the standard bearer for comic book readers (which is also free). It goes a couple of steps further in that it is not just a display engine but includes the functionality to manage your ebook collection. Here are most notes on this program:

• Bells and whistles: there are many of these, including multiple display modes (rotate, 2-page views, etc), scroll mode, information overlays, color adjustment, automatic background matching, a magnifier tool, etc.
• The user interface: is generally nice and highly customizable, but may have just too many options and tweaks to be user friendly. Supports a tabbed, explorer-style file browser that can be placed on the left, right, or bottom of the screen (or in its own window). The type of view within the browser can be customized as well in a way reminiscent of Windows’ folder views. You can even save your workspace once you arrive at a customized layout/view combo that you like or create and save multiple workspaces. See the tips and tricks page for more info.
• PDF support: supports PDF eComics (which is to say PDFs that contain images only). However ComicRack also has the ability to read any PDF provided that you install the latest version of Ghostscript as well.
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Description: PicLens is a free browser extension for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari that interacts with a number of the most popular image sharing sites to provide a seamless, full-screen "immersive slideshow" experience. Sites supported include Google Images, Yahoo Images, Facebook, Friendster, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums. It is also possible to embed PicLens immersive slideshows within your own site or blog.

This program is a little bit hard to describe: imagine that you’re browsing, say, Flickr, and that you are looking at a page full of thumbnails. Normally what you would do is click on the thumbnail and view the image, go back to the page with the thumbnail and click on the next image and so on. What PicLens offers is an alternate way of viewing the images that literally "takes over" and overlays itself on top of your browser window; your images will be displayed full screen and all thumbnails presented in a horizontal sequence that is quickly browsable on the bottom of the screen.

• How it works: whenever you are surfing on a site that supports PicLens, a little distinct arrow will appear on the image thumbnail when you mouse over it which signals that the images are browsable with PicLens. Clicking on the arrow will activate the PicLens image browser, while clicking on the thumbnail anywhere around it will open/display the image as normal. (See second screenshot).
• Browsing with PicLens: you can use the mouse or arrow keys to scroll through the images, as well as the navigation arrows to move/jump back and forth.
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Description: Thumbview is an open source program introduces thumbnail support (in Windows’ thumbnail folder view mode) to 19 image types that are not natively supported in Windows, including PNG, PSD and TIFF. It also adds informational tooltips for image file formats that are displayed when images are hovered over by the mouse.

Ever wondered why some image files display a preview thumbnail in explorer (when using ’thumbnail’ view) while others don’t? The reason quite simply is that Windows by default includes thumbnail support for only a handful of image files (e.g. JPG, GIF, BMP and a few others). What Thumbview does is add another 19 image types to this: CUT, DCX, DDS, MDL, MNG, PCD, PCX, PIC, PIX, PNG, PNM/PBM/PGM/PPM, PSD/PDD, PSP, PXR, SGI/RGB, TGA/VDA/ICB/VST, TIF/TIFF, WAL and XPM.

The screenshot above illustrates this; the folder on the left shows a folder in “thumbnail view” under Windows XP that contains 3 image files; the thumbnails for JPG images are showing while the PSD image is not. Once Thumbview is installed, however, thumbnail support is introduced for PSD (as well as numerous other image types not illustrated in the screenshot). Tooltips are now also available whenever you hover over any image with the mouse, which in itself is a very handy feature that can be very useful to have.
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Description: Group Shot is a free program that can automatically create a single ’perfect’ image from multiple image sources. It does this by merging the ’good’ parts from other images (typically shots of groups of people) into a final, perfect composite image.

Did you notice that whenever you’re taking pictures of people in a group that there’s always at least one person who’s squinting, frowning, or looking away even when you’ve finally managed to get all the other people in the picture flash perfect smiles?

Group Shot from Microsoft Research can take a number of pictures and semi-automatically merge the good parts to construct a perfect output image. If this is sounding a little bit strange, or if it sounds like it might involve a lot of work/tweaking — I have some news for you: it works like magic; a few clicks will automagically deliver perfect group shots that never existed in reality (its almost disconcerting).
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