Image search is evolving quickly. Today you don’t even need to use words to search images. Now you can use colors!. That’s right you can search images by color.

Let’s search the web for an autumn-like palette (yellow, red, brown) using the following 3 services. Let’s see how the search results are like.

1. PicItUp

PicItUp is a visual image search engine that combines word-based with color based search.

Test it: search for [autumn] and choose any color from the left column (I chose yellow). Now let’s look at the results:

Impressive, isn’t it?

Taking beautiful screenshots is part of my job as a tech blogger. However, when I am on my Mac, I will always avoid using the inbuilt screen capture function as I find them to be rather limited in features. Instead, I use several other third party apps that allow me to take better images and at the same time give me more control on how the shots should be taken.

If you are like me, who are searching for alternative Mac screen capture apps, here are 5 useful ones that I have used and can recommend.

How many instances have you needed to take a full-page snapshot of a website but lacked the resources to do it? We’ve covered some browser screenshot web-apps in the past but most of them have some limitations. Kyle wrote about kwout but the screenshots can’t be larger than 600 x 600 pixels. SuperScreenshots works pretty well but the font rendering is changed slightly in the screenshot.

Luckily for Mac, we have Paparazzi! No, I’m not getting excited, it just happens to have an exclamation sign in its name. Unlike the other two web-apps, Paparazzi is a desktop application. I prefer Paparazzi! over SuperScreenshots because it is more configurable and also provides an option to create thumbnails.

I am no webmaster by any stretch of the imagination, yet there are times in the course of my work where I need to be able to match the color of something on my screen to a project that I am working on.

There are several ways that I know of to do that. The first is to open up a program and seek out its color matching dialogue and apply what I call the “gosh, that looks close enough!” method to pick out a color. Another way is to copy the item that has the color I want by hitting “Print Screen” and then opening Paint, pasting in the item from the clip board, zooming in on it and then use the ‘Pick Color’ tool. At that point I can copy down the HEX code and I am good to go.

Webcomics are perhaps a more unusual subject for you to see on Make Use Of, but I thought it’d be a nice change of pace.

With the rise of the internet came the ability for everyone and anyone to self-publish. ‘Webcomics’ is a term that came to refer to any cartoon published on websites and archives.

While many conventional cartoons are also published on websites like Comics.com, Webcomics developed a unique and definable style which differentiates them from print media comics.

There is no dearth of online image editing tools and we have already covered some of the most powerful ones and some more free image editing programs. Each of the tools try to distinguish them from the herd by including some eye-popping features and effects and thus try everything to emulate the ultimate software which exists for the purpose - Photoshop.

TinEye is an image search engine by Idée that lets you find where a particular image has been used on the web.

You are probably saying, “Oh, but there is Google image search for me. Why would I need another one?”. But TinEye is an entirely different kind of image search. While Google image search uses text to search for associated images, TinEye uses an image as a query for searching. Google can’t do that - at least, not yet.

If you’re in a hurry, here’s a quick video explanation from Idée on how TinEye works. Or read on for my explanation.

For instance, drag a window and the window wobbles. Compiz also has plugin support which means that you can add more such effects to decorate your desktop’s look.