To bring back the romance, I went on a search to see if I could add more effects to Photo Booth. There were only a few interesting pre-packaged ones and most of them had something to do with image distortion (squeeze, bulge, dent, mirror etc.). That was fun for a while but I need the “Wow” factor back desperately.

In my search, I managed to uncover a few sites that offer a good collection of free Photo Booth effects.

From B-L-A-C-K-O-P, I found CatEye, which is a collection of 5 sets of effects. Each set has its own theme:

I especially like the BoobToob set, it makes me feel like I’m on television. If you’re sick or bored with the default Photo Booth effects, this will definitely bring back some fun.

CatEye will only work on Leopard and is free (direct download link)

From another site called Macpoupou Factory, I found a collection of Mac Photobooth effects which has been around for quite some time: MoreIchatEffects. After adding these effects, I realised that I have been missing out on a lot of fun! The effects are incredibly awesome beyond the ones Apple provide, especially Hologram – if you’re a Star Wars fan, you’ll love this one. It’s strangely uncanny.

Besides that, several other effects like ASCII art and Line Overlay are pretty cool.

MoreIchatEffects bundles 48 different effects and will only work on Leopard.

I can’t remember how I managed to find this next site but it offers 4 Photo Booth effects (Leopard only), from which I only like one. Visit the site and guess which one it is and let me now in the comments. (Hint: Did you know that Photo Booth has the ability to record video? You can ask Bush what he thought about the shoe).

Finally, a Photo Booth effect that must not be left out: Obamafy. Following in the footsteps of President-Elect Barack Obama, you can now quickly and simply create your “Hope” posters. Remember, Leopard only.

Depending on the user-level for which you save these effects (for ‘All Users’ or for ‘This User Only’), they will either be saved in /Users/{your username}/Library/Compositions or /Library/Compositions. In order to remove unwanted effects, just delete them from the appropriate folder. Keep in mind that if you add a lot of new effects at once, Photo Booth will crash while loading them. It’s best to add one set at a time.

Also, these effects will work with iChat! So, you can fool your friends into thinking that something’s gone wonky with your iSight or that they’re really seeing you through a hologram.

Got more effects to share? Know about other ways to bring back the fun to Photo Booth? Share with us in your comments. Lastly, if you’d like to use your iSight for something more productive, check out my article on Gawker and Eyesight.

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Gawker is a free application which your iSight uses to create time-lapse movies. As with all time-lapse movies, it uses a collection of photos taken within an interval (every 10 seconds, for example) and combines them to form a video.

Gawker’s party piece is: it does it all for you! Upon running Gawker, it searches for your iSight; and using Bonjour, it will also locate other shared iSights on your network! Yup, it allows remote webcam viewing (I’ll come back to that later).

Using Gawker is pretty easy once you figure out what it can do. Within its main application window, it lists the iSights which you can connect to. Shared remote webcams located via Bonjour will also be listed here. Clicking on them will bring up a preview window showing you what is going on through the iSight.

Here’s where the fun begins. If you click on ‘More’, you will find some interesting options. You may set a particular time for Gawker to start and stop recording, so that it won’t need to run the entire day – only at the specified times. You may also choose to share your iSight with someone else running Gawker, set the broadcast interval and a password in order to connect to you (optional). After you’re done setting up, hit ‘Record’ and let the magic work.

Like I said, Gawker’s party piece is it automatically creates a time-lapse movie. It doesn’t just take a picture within the preset interval – leaving you with a folder full of images, having to click through them individually. After Gawker is done recording, all you’re left with is a video file. Quick and hassle-free! Gawker is also powerful enough to record streams from up to four separate webcams and combine them in the final time-lapse video.

Possible usages for Gawker:

Another useful application is EyeSight. It also allows you to take time-lapse pictures between an interval from seconds to days. You can choose the output format of the images (from PNG, JPG, TIFF & BMP) and its size (640 x 480 and below).

Besides that, EyeSight provides you with the option of uploading your pictures to an FTP server, so that you gain access to them from anywhere instantaneously.

Gawker and EyeSight are both available for free to run on Mac OS X.

What else do you do with your Webcam? Have you found other uses for them? Let us know in the comments.

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(1) Cameroid

Options are:

a) Color

b) Morph

c) Scenes

(2) SIGOST

Options are:

a) Colors

b) Effects

(3) Seenly

Options are:

a) Colors

b) Effects

(4) Phozi

Phozi is NOT really at all like Photobooth, mainly because it lacks the “effects” side of the application, however, there are THEMED backgrounds and “Stamps”:

That’s it, I’m sure there are more out there, but the first 2, Sigost and Cameroid seem to be the best FREE webcam applications like Photobooth. Anybody have any other suggestions?

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