Capturing Images

Above you can see two screenshots of the capture interface. Sadly, the way Vignette pulls in camera data doesn’t allow for screenshots of the live preview screen (hence the black background). If you compare it to the Camera360 capture interface, it appears almost spartan. The screenshot on the left shows the selective focus/radial menu feature. When you tap anywhere on the screen, this large circular menu appears around your finger. Drag to the top, and the image will be refocused on that point. Drag to the bottom, and the capture options are shown (screenshot on the right).

But just because the interface is minimalistic, doesn’t mean it isn’t powerful. Unlike Little Photo, the capture stage here isn’t an afterthought. For instance, look at how many different capture modes you get.

Some of these bear explanation. “Blind” is the weirdest one. You get no live preview; the screen just goes black, and you’re supposed to aim your phone as best as you can, and snap an image. Perhaps it’s for times when you’re not supposed to be taking pictures, or for getting spontaneous shots. “Steady shot” tries to figure out when the phone is shaking and moving fast, and waits for you to hold it steady before taking the picture. The others are fairly self-explanatory.

Next, let’s take a look at the camera control options:

This gives you very explicit control over your phone’s camera; not many apps let you set the exposure compensation, for example.

Next, before moving onto post-production, let’s take a look at the file settings screen:

Here you can see one of my favorite features: Vignette can capture full-resolution images, and is beefy enough to apply effects to them. A 5-megapixel image is large (around 2MB). You can also control the quality, folder, and naming convention.

Okay, now let’s capture an image and try applying some effects.

Post-Production

My serious-looking cat, Ivan, will serve as our model for evaluating post-production and effects. Here’s the raw image, captured using Vignette, before applying any effects:

Now, let’s look at the effect interface:

This is one of Vignette’s weakest points. The effects are actually very powerful (and numerous), but there is no instant preview! If you don’t know what a certain effect does, you just have to apply it, go to the image, view it, and go back to apply a different effect. Quite a laborious process really; perhaps Vignette can learn something from Little Photo’s elegant effect interface with its instant live preview and transparent menu.

Interface considerations aside, Vignette offers a boatload of possible effects, neatly sorted into categories:

I decided to go for an over-saturated looks, accentuating Ivan’s eyes:

Another key difference between Vignette and Little Photo is that you can’t apply multiple effects all at once. You need to pick just one; but once you pick it, you can heavily customize it:

For instance, I wanted to add some extra vignetting to the effect I selected, as well as some light leaks. The tweaked result looks like this:

Quite a mild effect, really. Of course, you can also add a frame, out of a staggeringly-rich menu of options:

I went for a 16:9 white rounded frame, and the end result looks like this:

Saving Presets

After you’ve tweaked all the options to death, you might want to save them as a specific preset. If course, Vignette always saves the last values you used, but given the app’s breadth of options you may not want to limit it to just one type of photos. So let’s just save this set of options with a descriptive name:

In the future, I could easily pick out this specific combination (effect and frame) out of the list of favorites:

And what’s even cooler is that Vignette lets me create shortcuts for specific setting combinations right on my homescreen:

So instead of using three different apps (one for HDR, one for “normal” photos and one for Retro-style, say) I could just create three shortcuts to the same app, with different settings.

Bottom Line

Vignette is a powerful, capable, no-nonsense camera app. Its biggest drawback is the lack of a live preview feature for the effect interface. Other than that, it makes for a very solid choice. Stay tuned for more quality camera reviews – and feel free to recommend some of your own in the comments, of course.

Public Domain Pictures

This page is a repository for public domain images. It is maintained solely by its users, who can upload and download images for free. Some photos require a model or property release, when used commercially. This, however, is a general requirement for photos. Material can easily be browsed by various categories, including professional or seasonal photos. Image tags allow an easy search.

The page for each image contains detailed information about the license, the camera used to take it, and links to the artist. The website cleverly supports the creators by offering a premium download and the option to buy the artist a coffee.

Wikimedia Commons

Most images used on Wikipedia are part of the Wikimedia Commons, a database of over 10 million freely usable media files, including public domain images. Recently, for example, the Russian International News Agency has donated 100 historical photographs from their archives. Media files can be surfed by topic, location, type, author, license, and source. Each of these categories has subcategories, to refine the search. You can also search files by tags.

The dedicated page for each features details about the item, including the permission for use and any licenses associated with the file. For most media files you will find that the copyright has simply expired and it has thus moved to the public domain.

Image After

Image After describes itself as the raw base for your creativity. The images provided on this page all underline the same terms of use, which basically are that you can use the images for anything, other than building a page that is in direct competition with Image After.

You can simply search images or use the thorough options, which allows you to sort an image category for example by size, then filter it by color. You can also search based on image tags.

Public Domain Photos

The 5,000 photos and 8,000 free clip arts on this page can be used for any purpose, including commercial. The photos are typically provided in a single high resolution. They are tagged and sorted into categories, offering you two ways to easily find them.

Stock.XCHNG

This resource for free stock photos has been so popular that not only have we mentioned it multiple times on MakeUseOf, it was also recently acquired by Getty Images.

Stock.XCHNG presently contains almost 400,000 photos and many of them are royalty free with no further usage restrictions. You can quickly view the restrictions in the availability field underneath the respective image. Some artists request to be notified or credited, others only require standard restrictions, which are defined by the Stock.XCHNG.

To download material you have to sign up with Stock.XCHNG.

Flickr

Flickr is an obvious resource, yet it is often neglected. Using the advanced search feature, you can search only photos with a Creative Commons license that allows you to use the content commercially and/or modify, adapt, or build upon the content. These two licenses in combination essentially make the image ‘public domain’ in that you can use it for anything. However, the license restriction is that you have to credit the original creator.

If you are looking for very specific images, you should check out the public domain image resources listed on Wikipedia. They feature historical images, as well as visual arts, logos, books, and more.

A site that has been recommended many times in comments to previous articles is morgueFile. Unfortunately, the site was very slow when I tested it, hence it is not properly included in this article.

For more royalty free image resources, check out the following articles:

• Top 5 Free Websites for Quality Copyright Free Photographs
• 10 Best Websites For Free Vector Art Downloads
• Add some Glamour with Royalty Free Images

Where do you get your public domain or royalty free images from?

Image credits: Petr Jilek

Thumbnail Me offers a solution for those of us who would like to have the ability to automate making thumbnails from videos. With this application, you can create thumbnails of different frames within a video file quickly and easily.

What Is Thumbnail Me?

Thumbnail me is a free and open source thumbnail generator. It’s cross-platform (Windows XP/Vista/7 and Linux, but not Mac…sorry!) and it creates images of videos and provides the option to upload them to ImageShack. Thumbnail Me is coded in C++ and uses the Qt 4.7 library which is why it is capable of running on both Windows and Linux based operating systems.

Thumbnail me also works with a wide range of video types, including AVI, MKV, TS, M2TS, MPEG, MPG, Mp4, VOB, WMV, OGG, 3GP, MOV, FLV, and SWF.

How Do I Use Thumbnail Me?

If you’re ready to get started with Thumbnail Me, the first thing you’re going to want to do is head over to the website and download the application.

Once you install and run the app, you can begin by selecting a source, output folder, etc. Then enter a title and any other information you would like to be included with your file(s).

You can also select an image format for your thumbnail generation. Available formats include JPEG, PNG, BMP, and TIFF. Optionally, you can log in with your ImageShack account for uploading the generated thumbnail images to the service as well.

Thumbnail Me also gives you the option to preview the potential thumbnail image before generating it. When you’re ready to proceed, just click the Launch button. Your video screens will be created instantly.

Conclusion

When taking screenshots of videos the most common use that comes to mind (at least as far as I’m concerned) is torrents. When seeking out a torrent of a video or movie (one that’s being shared legally of course!), it helps to be able to view screen captures of the footage before committing to download it, as these types of files tend to be rather large and can take a long time to download. It’s also a good way to tell if you are downloading the right file, especially if you’re having difficulty remembering the title.

Thumbnail Me is a pretty versatile application that supports a number of different parameters. If you are ever in need of a video screenshot application, Thumbnail Me is a tool that is more than capable in suiting your needs.

Let us know in the comments what you think of it.  Or maybe you know of a better alternative?

The Internet is full of entertainment, but if you’re looking for more amusing ‘lol’ images or other priceless images and other goodies, be ready to unleash your inner procrastinator and check out the following list of websites. They’re bound to entertain you with tons of hilarious pictures for at least a couple of hours.

theCHIVE

theCHIVE is a booming photoblog with many recurring posts, most of which are collections of hilarious, bizarre or otherwise, potentially viral images. Some of these posts include the Daily Afternoon Randomness, which is a highly popular set of either edited or unedited, random and funny pictures, as well as the Daily Morning Awesomeness, another popular post with a variety of either inspiring, cool or sometimes, even jaw-dropping but hilarious images.

There are also other sections on the site, which feature themed posts for certain weekdays, viral videos, as well as, photos of random hot girls or actual female readers of the site that may sometimes be NSFW. The site’s also done pretty well when it comes to donating to readers, or Chivers, in need, but it has also created some Internet hoaxes that have even fooled network shows and other media outlets. Still, theCHIVE is highly addicting and serves a ton of photo galleries that will satisfy the palate of those who are hungry for raw comedy in picture form.

BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed shows viral videos, images, links and general content in real-time, submitted by the staff and users of the site, which was actually started by a cofounder of the Huffington Post. The posts range from human interest stories to celebrity gossip news. You will still catch plenty of funny pictures for different types of humor on this site, as well as interesting and useful information once in a while.

Cracked

Cracked started out as a humor magazine, first released in 1958, and eventually saw itself on the web, continuing the works of the print edition (which was discontinued in 2007). It features lots of compilations (e.g. 8 Historic Symbols That Mean The Opposite Of What You Think), weekly image manipulation contests, and daily contests to allow users to submit their creative captions to bizarre photos.

CollegeHumor

This site has been active for 7+ years and is known for having plenty of helpful articles for college survival, and creating original comedy shorts, like the web series Jake and Amir, and ones even including celebrities, such as Michael C. Hall (the lead of Dexter) and Malin Akerman (from Watchmen). When it comes to funny pictures, CollegeHumor also has picture galleries with lots of bizarre and hilarious images you can’t miss.

FailBlog & Icanhascheezburger [Both From Cheezburger Network]

FailBlog features lots of hilarious videos and pictures that can either belong in the fail, the more intense “epic fail”, or win categories. The site’s Youtube channel has over a million subscribers and it’s almost like a “America’s Funniest Videos” show for Youtube. Icanhascheezburger is of course, its sister site that shows cat pictures with witty captions in lolspeak, generally for different categories. These “kitteh” videos and images have exploded on the web in the recent years because there’s always a new cat video or photo these days, but it never gets old to see some cute animals doing
innocent and hilarious things.

Funny Or Die

Founded by comedian and actor Will Ferrell, Funny Or Die, launched this website to feature comedy shorts submitted by users, and sometimes, even original short films starring Ferrell and his colleagues, and sometimes even other actors. Though the site is known for its video content, it also has photo caption contests for users to vote on and funny picture galleries to entertain everyone.

Geeky Fun

Our site co-founder, Kaly, has been scouring the web in search of hilarious pictures and posting them for a while, so be sure to check out our very own Geeky Fun section. It’s mostly material that even tech-savvy users can enjoy. If you use Google Reader or any other feed reader, add the Geeky Fun RSS feed! You won’t regret it!

Did we miss any site? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: Scott Clark

If you’re familiar with IrfanView, and think that it’s only a simple image editor and screenshot app, then I invite you to take another look. All of the following script commands can be run from the command prompt, so long as you are working in the directory where IrfanView is installed – which is typically “C:\Program Files(x86)\IrFanView\”. All of the following commands will work from there, or you can include that directory in your system PATH variable so that the “i_view32.exe” command will be recognized no matter where you’re working from.

Running IrfanView Commands

You can find a long list of script commands from within the IrfanView application when you click on Help and search for ”command line options“. I want to point out 10 of the most powerful and useful commands that are available.  You can issue these from the command prompt (or from within a Windows Script or Batch file).

Create An Instant Slideshow

The first command I want to show you is one that creates an instant slideshow from a whole bunch of pictures. These can be pictures that you have stored in a directory, or from a list of files defined in a text file. The command is as follows:

"i_view32.exe /slideshow=c:\temp\testpics\*.* /closeslideshow"

The way this works is simple. You could replace  ”c:\mypictures\*.*” with “c:\mypics.txt“ if you like if you want to use a text file filled with a list of pictures with the full path for each.

Pictures show up in the center of your screen on a black background. The /closeslideshow parameter tells the app to close automatically after the last picture.

The nice thing about being able to launch a slideshow with one command line is that you can display your slideshow instantly without any work. Just type the command and start scrolling!

Look At All Images In A Directory

The next command is a fast way to take a look at all images within a directory without the need to open up every one of them.

"i_view32.exe c:\temp\testpics /thumbs"

This instantly launches IrfanView in thumbnail mode, and defaults to the directory that you’ve defined.

Resize Lots Of Images At Once

The third command I want to cover is my favorite. One thing that I find annoying and time consuming is resizing a large collection of images.

Instead, just issue this command and you’re done in seconds.

"i_view32.exe c:\temp\testpics\*.jpg /resize=(200,100) /aspectratio /resample /convert=c:\temp\testpics\testsmall\*.png"

Let me break this down. The first part defines your source directory and image type. Then you define the resize parameters. The last part of the command will convert the output images to any format. In seconds, all images are done.

Send Image Collections To The Printer

The fourth command is pretty simple. Want to send a collection of images to your default printer? Just issue the following command.

"i_view32.exe c:\testpics\*.jpg /print"

Take Instant Screenshots With A File Timestamp

Another pretty cool command is one that takes an instant screenshot and saves as a file with a time stamp.

"i_view32.exe /capture=0 /convert=c:\temp\capture_$U(%d%m%Y_%H%M%S).jpg"

The capture=0 could be 1 (current monitor), 2 (foreground window), 3 (client area), 4 (rectangle section), or 5 (launch in capture mode).

Once the full screenshot is saved to file, you can email it or process it using other Windows Scripting or Batch commands. The potential of this command is pretty powerful.

Search For Images Quickly On Your Computer

The sixth command is a fast and easy way to search for images on your computer. Just type:

"i_view32.exe c:\temp\testpics\ /thumbs /filepattern="*.png""

This will open IrfanView in thumbnail mode, using the file pattern that you defined.

Deny User Permissions

The next command I wanted to show you is probably the coolest. Let’s say that you’re writing a Windows Script and you want to display a picture to the user, but you don’t want to let them modify or change the file. You can accomplish this with the following command:

"i_view32.exe c:\test.jpg /hide=7"

The “hide” value is a combination of what parts of the window you want to hide. Just choose 1 (toolbar), 2 (status bar), 4 (menu bar), or 8 (caption). To combine multiple parts of the window, just add the numbers together!

Be careful about using 15, because if you hide everything, the user will have no way of ever closing the window at all.

Output Text Files To A TIF File

Some other wonderfully useful commands include outputting text files to a TIF file:

"i_view32.exe c:\test.jpg /append=c:\test.tif"

Create A Panorama Image

Creating a panorama image from multiple images – 1 is horizontal and 2 is vertical.

"i_view32.exe /panorama=(1,c:\pics\china1.png,c:\pics\china2.png,c:\pics\china3.png)"

Set An Image As Desktop Wallpaper

Finally, the command that could also make for a pretty good practical joke if you use the right photo, the command to set an image as the computer desktop wallpaper background.

"i_view32.exe c:\test.jpg /wall=0"

Set wall equal to 0 for a centered image, 1 to tile it, 2 to stretch it and 3 to resize the image proportionally.

You can set the background image on your PC using this command much faster than the number of clicks it takes to do it otherwise. That’s the beauty of the set of command tools you get through IrfanView – you can process and manipulate images on your PC much faster and more efficiently than would ever be possible using the old point and click approach.

Give a few of these commands a try on your own PC and see if it helps you save a little time and become more productive when dealing with images. Share your thoughts and your own IrfanView command line tips in the comments section below.

Image credits: Kakao Por