Free Paint.NET 3.5.1 – Maybe Not A Photoshop Killer But…….

This latest release of Paint.NET (October 9th, 2011), might not be quite Photoshop in disguise, but it’s a pretty serious contender.

While it can’t perform some of the more esoteric functions of Photoshop, it can certainly assist even an average photo hobbyist achieve spectacular results – results which are generally not achievable in a free photo application.

I’ve always been a big fan of Adobe Photoshop, the trendsetter/innovator for all photo editor and image manipulation software, but I stopped buying Photoshop at version 7, and in 2004 switched over to Paint.NET.

The downside of Adobe Photoshop, especially for typical users (other than its price – which is formidable), is it’s huge size on disk; it’s very challenging platform requirements, and an extreme learning curve which demands time and training.

Most of us don’t need the flexibility, or the power of a high end (read: expensive), photo editor. Instead, we’re generally looking for an application that’s small (at less than 4 MB, Paint.NET is small), fast, and free, with an intuitive interface that’s very easy to use; especially for those with only modest previous experience. Incidentally, for everyday basic photo manipulation, Irfanview gets a real workout on my machine.

You don’t have to take advantage of all of the powerful features built into this impressive application of course – see fast facts below. You can just stick to those tools you are most familiar with, including resizing, cropping, correcting red eye, flipping, and rotating. As well, you can perform a wide variety of additional image adjustments, including brightness, contrast, and applying special effects such as sharpen and blur.

Fast facts:

Interface – Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface. Every feature and user interface element was designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable without assistance. The interface is also enhanced for Aero Glass if you are using Windows 7 or Vista.

Performance – Extensive work has gone into making Paint.NET the fastest image editor available.

Layers – Usually only found on expensive or complicated professional software, layers form the basis for a rich image composition experience. You may think of them as a stack of transparency slides that, when viewed together at the same time, form one image.

Special Effects – Many special effects are included for enhancing and perfecting your images. Everything from blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise, and embossing are included. Also included is our unique 3D Rotate/Zoom effect that makes it very easy to add perspective and tilting.

Adjustments – Adjustments are also included which help you tweak an image’s brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, curves, and levels. You can also convert an image to black and white, or sepia-toned.

Powerful Tools – The facilities for creating and working with selections is powerful, yet still simple enough to be picked up quickly. Other powerful tools include the Magic Wand for selecting regions of similar color, and the Clone Stamp for copying or erasing portions of an image. There is also a simple text editor, a tool for zooming, and a Recolor tool.

Unlimited History – Everybody makes mistakes, and everybody changes their mind. To accommodate this, every action you perform on an image is recorded in the History window and may be undone. Once you’ve undone an action, you can also redo it. The length of the history is only limited by available disk space.

Active Online Community – Paint.NET has an online forum with a friendly, passionate, and ever-expanding community. Be sure to check out the constantly growing list of tutorials and plugins!

Automatically Updated – Updates are free, and contain new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes. Upgrading to the latest version is very simple, requiring only two clicks of the mouse.

System requirements: Windows 2003, Vista, Server 2008, XP, Win 7 – NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (automatically downloaded with the application).

Languages: English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Spanish

Download at: Paint.NET

Plugins –  There’s a solid choice of plugins available. These plugins add new effects and the ability to handle new file types. You can check these out here.

Tutorials – Tutorials that describe the use of core features of Paint.NET such as tools, effects, and adjustments. Check them out here.

Unless you have extremely unusual image editing requirements that can only be met with Photoshop, Paint.NET should more than meet your needs, and then some.

BTW, Paint.NET v4.0 is targeted for release in 2012. Features planned for version 4.0 include a new UI, improved extensibility, revamped brushes and shapes system, antialiased selections, and adjustment layers.

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Windows Live Photo Gallery – Top 4 Features

My name is Mitz from http://tips4pc.com/ and I have been a Windows computer geek for over 25 years. I have seen software come and go over the years, succeed and fail, but Windows Live Photo Gallery is definitely a keeper.

I know this software is not new, however I feel that people are not seeing its full potential. Some of the features included with Windows live Gallery are so new to all of us, that we do not even know we have these amazing abilities on our computers.

Without further ado, I will mention some of my favorite features in Windows live photo Gallery.

#1. Windows Live Photo Gallery – Searching

Windows live photo Gallery has its own Find tab entirely dedicated to finding the photo or video you want on your computer. This makes it so much easier to find a lost photo or picture on your computer.

1. Simply go to the find tab at the top of the program.
2. Choose a folder from the left navigation pane. If you do not know what folder to choose, I usually click on my pictures folder.
3. You can search by dates, tagged faces, star rated, or even simple text search.

In the screenshot below, I first pressed on the Months icon and narrowed my search down to April 2011. After doing this I pressed on the text search icon on the right. Now I can type in what I am looking for and the search has already been narrowed down for me.

#2. Windows Live Photo Gallery – Photo Fuse

This is by far my favorite feature in Windows live photo Gallery! You can get three or four pictures and turn them into one really great photo. Look at my examples below. Initially I started with two photos, took the best from them both, and then ended up with a photo where everyone is facing the front.

How to fuse photos together?

1. Select two or more similar photos in the Windows live photo Gallery by putting a tick in the left corner of the photo. This means it is selected.
2. Go to the create tab at the top and click on the photo fuse icon.
3. Select the area of the photo that you want to replace.
4. When you have done this you will see some choices appear. Pick the best part of the photo by clicking on it.
5. Your photo will now be changed instantly.
6. Go through and change all the parts of the photo that do not look right.
7. When you are happy with your picture you can click on the close file icon at the top.
8. Your picture will be automatically saved. You will see that you now have a new version of the picture in the folder where the original pictures were saved.

#3. Windows Live Photo Gallery – Retouch Tool

If you are an expert at retouching photos using Photoshop then you will probably cringe at the thought of using anything else to do the job. Let me tell you that this retouch tool is just a quick fix and will not do the same job as a professional photo editing program.

Here is an example below. Look very closely at the clothes line in the background. In one photo it has a cloth on the line and in the other it does not. I removed the cloth in literally one second.

All I did was select the area and it was taken away. Now with this kind of photo the Windows Live Gallery retouch tool worked well for me.

How to retouch a photo?

1. Double-click on the photo that you want to retouch.
2. Click on the retouch icon at the top of the screen.
3. Select the area on the photo that you want to read touch. For example, I selected the cloth hanging from the clothesline. You may not be able to select the entire section, therefore just choose a small area.
4. As soon as you choose the area it will change.
5. When you have finished retouching the photo simply press close file.

As I said, this photo retouching tool is really just for the simple jobs but it is very handy to have around because it is so quick to do. I definitely will be using for jobs likes this..

#4. Windows Live Photo Gallery – Importing photos and videos

It is fantastic that Windows live photo Gallery is able to import photos and videos from your digital camera. Back in the days when Windows XP was king, we had the Microsoft scan and camera wizard to import photos to our computers. Unfortunately when Windows Vista came along, the scan and camera wizard disappeared from existence. This is why it is great that Microsoft has bought out Windows live photo Gallery as I see this program as more than an equivalent to the Microsoft scan at and camera wizard.

How to import pictures?

1. On the home tab in Windows live photo Gallery, simply press on the import icon.
2. Make sure your camera or device is connected to the computer and on so Windows live Gallery can find it.
3. Choose your camera from the list and click import.
4. Now you get many choices when import in your photos to your computer. You can review organize or group photos so you will have no trouble finding them in a year or two.
5. When you are done choosing, categorizing, and so on, choose import.

I strongly suggest that you check out Windows live photo Gallery for yourself! It is seriously an all in one program that is absolutely amazing because it is free. There are so many more features included with this software that it would probably take an entire day to go through.

Guest post by Mitz Pantic http://tips4pc.com/

What is your favourite feature in Windows live photo Gallery? Comment below and let me know.

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Looking For The Best Free Screen Capture Utility? Checkout MWSnap

I like to use a lot of screen captures when I review an application – a picture is worth a thousand words, and all that. Lately, I’ve gotten more than a few questions from readers requesting the lowdown on the program I use to generate these screen shots.

Since I’m heavily into freeware (85% of my apps are freeware), I’ve been using the freeware screen capture application MWSnap, for years.

MWSnap is a highly rated small, yet powerful, Windows program for snapping (capturing) images from selected parts of the screen. I use it daily to create high-quality screen captures for presentations, documents, and most particularly – application screen captures for my Blog.

I use MWSnap so often, that I’ve pinned it to the Taskbar.

The user interface is very simple, and very easy to follow. I must admit though, that I rarely see the interface since I generally use the “hot key” function.

Fast facts:

Image editing – basic image editing options

5 snapping modes.

Support for BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG and GIF formats, with selected color depth and quality settings.

System-wide hotkeys.

Clipboard copy/paste.

Printing.

Auto-saving, auto-printing.

Auto-start with Windows.

Minimizing to system tray.

An auto-extending list of fixed sizes, perfect for snapping images for icons and glyphs.

A zoom tool for magnifying selected parts of the screen.

A ruler tool for measuring screen objects lengths.

A color picker showing screen colors with separated RGB parts.

Fast picture viewer.

Adding frames and mouse pointer images.

Multilevel configurable undo and redo.

System Requirements: Any 32-bit Windows OS. I run this app on both Windows 7, and XP Pro systems.

Download at: Download.com

This application is an excellent choice for everyone –  from casual, to experienced users.

Additional free screen capture utilities mentioned by regular readers.

PicPick – PicPick is user friendly and full of features for creating your image, suitable for software developers, graphic designers and home user.
It is an all-in-one program that provides full-featured screen capture tool, intuitive image editor, color picker, color palette, pixel ruler, protractor, crosshair and even whiteboard.

EasyCapture – EasyCapture is a easy-to-use free screen capture software that can capture any part of screen from your desktop. It can capture scrolling windows and entire web pages.

With this screen capture freeware, you can edit captured images and save to bmp, jpg, gif, png, tiff image format. You can add text annotation, arrows and other objects to create professional screenshots for inclusion in online tutorials, Word documents, manuals, promotion material, presentations, websites, emails and so on.

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Adobe Lightroom Release Candidate 3.4 Cleared For Download – Save $299, Maybe

In the past, running beta and release candidate software could be challenging. But, I’ve noticed in the last year or two, that beta, and more particularly release candidate software, can often be as stable as the final release. It may well be, that Microsoft raised the bar for both beta, and release candidates, with reasonably flawless releases of Windows 7 in both these formats.

Adobe, well known for its very expensive, though admittedly highly sophisticated applications (with high production costs), has just cleared release candidate 3.4 of its Photoshop Lightroom 3, for download.

Adobe’s definition of a release candidate –

A “release candidate” label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all of our customers. The Lightroom 3.4 update includes support for many new cameras and lens profiles.

If you’re unfamiliar with Lightroom, try this description I came across not too long ago – “For the uninitiated, Lightroom is Photoshop’s specialized sibling; where Photoshop is an imaging Swiss Army Knife, Lightroom is a steak knife for photographers.”

A little confused? I must admit – so was I. So, try this definition from Adobe –

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 software unites your digital photography essentials in one fast and intuitive package. Create something beautiful. Express your vision. Move your audience.

Lightroom gets you there with the tools you need to create great images, manage all your photographs, and showcase them with style and impact.

If you’re a high level photographer, or you have aspirations in that direction, you might consider downloading this release candidate. There’s no guarantee that this is a perfectly flawless application, but if it’s relatively so, you just might save yourself $299 USD.

Personally, I’ve taken advantage of this offer and plan to test drive Photoshop Lightroom 3.4 in the coming weeks.

System requirements:

Windows –  XP with Service Pack 3, Vista (32 bit and 64 bit); Windows 7 (32 bit and 64 bit), 2GB of RAM, 1,024×768 display

Mac OS – OS X v10.5 or v10.6, 2GB of RAM, 1,024×768 display

Languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swedish.

Check it out at: The product page.

Download at: Adobe Labs

As with all beta, or release candidates, take sensible precautions prior to installation. This should include setting a new restore point.

Note: The application installed with no difficulty on my test system.

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Wipe Out Unwanted Photo Elements With Free PhotoWipe

As an amateur photographer (very amateur), I know how hard it is to get that perfect picture. Countless times, over the years, I’ve ended up with the perfect shot only to have it spoiled by one small detail that if removed, would enhance the photo a great deal.

PhotoShop of course, is a terrific software product for all sorts of photo manipulation, including removing unwanted objects from photos. The downside with PhotoShop is, the learning curve is particularly steep. As well, PhotoShop is definitely at the upper end of the price range for software, and probably out of reach of the average user.

Recently, I came across a great little (1.5MB), free Windows application, PhotoWipe, (last updated March 18, 2010), a basic photo editing tool which makes it easy to get rid of unwanted elements from photos.

The GUI is very simple since it includes just a few basic tools.

Using PhotoWipe doesn’t require that the user learn a complicated process.

All you need to do is:

Open the image to be worked on.

Paint over the parts to be removed black, using one of the brushes which are available in a number of sizes.

If you make a mistake you can use the eraser tool to correct your error.

Use the built in preview viewer to check your work.

Save your new file.

Take a look at the photo below, taken from my Dock a few summers ago, which shows an unsightly TV tower deep in the background.

Using a simple PhotoWipe tool and bingo! No more ugly TV tower.

PhotoWipe does a good job when removing, or repairing, minor elements within a photo, but don’t expect miracles. Even so, it should be part of every amateur photographer’s image editing toolbox.

System Requirements: Windows 7, Windows Me, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows NT, Windows XP

Download at: Download.com

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Photoscape – The Number One Downloaded Free Photo Application

I spent part of the weekend looking at the photos I snapped this Summer, which is on the way to a downshift into Fall, here in the Northern hemisphere. Some were very cool and worth saving as is, some weren’t worth the HD space they took up, and some were “keepers”, but needed corrective editing.

I keep a bunch of photo editing software on my computer including IrfanView, a fast, light, basic photo editor , which I use frequently throughout the week. But, for the kind of editing I had in mind (not heavy Adobe Photoshop specialty editing), I had to look at another application – Photoscape.

In the two years, or so, that I’ve been using this free application, it’s come out of nowhere to become the most popular photo app download on CNET, with over Sixteen Million downloads (300,000 downloads in the last week alone). I’m not at all surprised.

Photoscape is a terrific photo application that’s small (under 17 MB), fast, free, and sports an intuitive interface that’s easy to use; especially for those with only modest previous experience.

You don’t have to take advantage of all of the powerful features built into this impressive application of course – see fast facts below. You can just stick to those tools you are most familiar with, including resizing, cropping, correcting red eye, .…………

As well, you can perform a wide variety of additional image adjustments, including brightness, contrast, and applying a host of special effects.

An unusual aspect of the Photoscape opening screen interface is its circular layout, as this screen capture illustrates. A very cool presentation!

Photoscape offers feature rich online help, supplemented with video for those of us who are into, “show me how” mode. The following screen capture illustrates the video running the Bright/Contrast help feature. I give this a big “thumbs up”.

If you’re in the market for a fully featured photo editor, then Photoscape is worth a very close look.

Photoscape Fast Facts:

Viewer: View photos in your folder, create a slideshow

Editor: resizing, brightness and color adjustment, white balance, backlight correction, frames, balloons, mosaic mode, adding text, drawing pictures, cropping, filters, red eye removal, blooming, clone stamp

Batch editor: Batch edit multiple photos

Page: Merge multiple photos on the page frame to create one final photo

Combine: Attach multiple photos vertically or horizontally to create one final photo

Animated GIF: Use multiple photos to create a final animated photo

Print: Print portrait shots, passport photos

Splitter: Slice a photo into several pieces

Screen Capture: Capture your screenshot and save it

Color Picker: Zoom in on images, search and pick a color

Rename: Change photo file names in batch mode

Raw Converter: Convert RAW to JPG

Paper Print: Print lined, graph, music and calendar paper

Face Search: Find similar faces on the Internet

Languages: English, Korean, Chinese, Traditional Chinese, German, Dutch, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Mexico, Latin America), French, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Colombian), Thai, Hungarian, Turkish, Catalan, Slovak, Czech, Norwegian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Swedish, Estonian, Danish, Romanian, Hebrew, Galician, Finnish, Indonesian and Arabic.

System requirements: Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/Vista/Win 7.

Download at: Download.com

For the Geeky Photographer:

Image Analyzer 1.30

If you’re a geeky photographer, then Image Analyzer could be just the program you’ve been searching for. This very small (1.24 MB), free, advanced, feature-rich image editor, comes complete with serious enhancement and analytical tools.

At the advanced level, this is not a program for the faint of heart, and requires a good understanding of photographic techniques. Check it out at “A Seriously Advanced Photo Tool – Free Image Analyzer 1.31”, on this site.

Lighter grade free photo applications – fast, small, and flexible.

FastStone Image Viewer

XnView

IrfanView

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Heading Back To School? Make Your Life Easier And Checkout These Free PC Applications

School is in and let’s face it, you’ll need to trim your expenses this year and software applications that cost hundreds of dollars are not going to be number one on your list of must haves. Well, they don’t really need to be.

There’s a ton of tried and tested free software out in the wild blue of the Internet, that will meet virtually every need you’re likely to have this school year.

Take a look at the following recommended free downloads that will help you communicate, get those assignments done, have some fun, and manage and protect your system while you’re surfing the Internet.

These applications have riding out the storm of new competitors, and have developed a strong, loyal following, based on their reliability and functionality.

Process those words:

OpenOffice

OpenOffice 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages including Microsoft Word.

AbiWord:

AbiWord is a free light weight word processing program similar to Microsoft Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks.

WordWeb:

WordWeb is a one-click English thesaurus and dictionary for Windows that can look up words in almost any program. It works off-line, but can also look up words in web references such as the Wikipedia encyclopedia.

Manipulate and correct your pics – put them online:

FastStone Image Viewer:

This is one of my favorite photo applications, with good reason. It’s not just a viewer, but an image browser, converter, and an editor as well. You’ll find the interface intuitive and very easy to use. This program is loaded with features including, renaming, cropping, color adjustments, lossless JPEG transformation, drop shadow effects, image frames, scanner support, histogram and much more.

IrfanView:

With IrfanView you can fix and enhance digital photos including resizing, cropping, correcting red eye, flipping, and rotating. As well, you can perform a wide variety of image adjustments, including brightness, contrast, and applying special effects such as sharpen and blur. I’ve been using this neat little program (every day), for years and with each new release it just keeps getting better.

Google Picasa:

A free application that helps you locate and organize all the photos on your computer, edit and add effects with a few simple clicks, and share your photos with others through email, prints, and on the web.

Play those tunes:

Audacity:

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It’s available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Definitely the best of breed.

iTunes:

According to Apple, this is the world’s best digital music jukebox. Download music, TV shows, movies, and more.

Winamp:

A multimedia player that supports numerous audio and video formats. It also plays streamed video and audio content, live and recorded, authored worldwide.

Watch your fav videos:

Miro:

Miro is a free application for channels of internet video (also known as ‘video podcasts and video rss). Miro is designed to be easy to use and to give you an elegant full screen viewing experience.

VLC:

A highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

Free FLV Converter:

This free software let you search YouTube and dailyMotion videos without opening your browser and you can even watch the videos using the built-in video player.

Free Video To iPhone Converter:

Convert video files to Apple iPhone MP4 video format. Convert the whole movie or select a partition from the movie to convert (trim video).

iPod Video Converter:

Free iPod Video Converter provides an easy and completed way to convert all popular video formats to iPod video.

Better browsing:

Firefox:

Firefox includes tons of useful features such as tabbed browsing, built-in and customizable search bars, a built-in RSS reader and a huge library of extensions developed by thousand of developers.

Opera:

The fastest browser on Earth is even faster. But that is not all. Use Opera Turbo to double your page-download speed on slow connections. Download Opera now and get more from the Web.

Web of Trust (WOT):

WOT is a free Internet Browser add-on. WOT tests web sites you are visiting for spyware, spam, viruses, browser exploits, unreliable online shops, phishing, and online scams, helping you avoid unsafe web sites.

Protect your system:

Immunet Protect 2 – Free Cloud Based Antivirus Application:

Immunet Protect is a lightweight cloud based, community driven, antivirus application, (available in both a free, and a paid version), designed to add a layer of protection while working in partnership with the most popular antimalware solutions.

Microsoft Security Essentials:

Microsoft Security Essentials, which incorporates antivirus, antispyware and rootkit protection, all under one roof, was released by Microsoft as a free  replacement application for the late, and unlamented, Windows Live OneCare.

ThreatFire:

ThreatFire blocks malware (including zero-day threats) by analyzing program behavior, instead of relying only on a signature based database. ThreatFire works together with your signature based security applications, to increase the effectiveness of your total security arsenal.

SUPERAntiSpyware Free Edition

The free version of this award winning program, is used by millions of people worldwide to protect their computers. And why not? SUPERAntiSpyware is well known for its high malware detection rate. A simple, intuitive, and easy to use interface makes SUPERAntiSpyware straightforward to setup, customize, and run, for both less experienced and expert users alike.

Zone Alarm Firewall:

If you are a casual computer user, Zone Alarm Free is definitely worth considering as a new Firewall installation, or as a replacement for a current Firewall that is not meeting your expectations.

Staying in touch:

Windows Live messenger:

The next generation MSN Messenger. It comes with everything that were already available in Messenger, and a new IM Initiative that makes helping your favorite charity as easy as sending an instant message.

Pidgin:

A multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once. Pidgin can work with: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo!, MySpace IM and many more.

Trillian:

A fully featured, stand-alone, chat client that supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC.

Skype

In its basic form, Skype is a free communication package, using proprietary code, which allows users to make free computer to computer calls, including video calls, across the globe. As well, there are a bundle of additional features, that can be purchased at a low cost, which will expand the application’s functionality.

System Tools:

WinPatrol:

You can monitor your startup programs and services, cookies and current tasks. Should you need to, WinPatrol allows you to terminate processes and enable, or disable, startup programs. There are additional features that make WinPatrol a very powerful addition to your security applications.

CCleaner:

CCleaner is a freeware system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. It removes unused files from your system – allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. Additionally it contains a fully featured registry cleaner. But the best part is that it’s fast; normally taking less than a second to run.

Autoruns:

You can configure Autoruns to show additional locations, including Explorer shell extensions, toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications, auto-start services, and more. Autoruns goes considerably beyond the MSConfig utility bundled with Windows.

Glary Utilities:

Glary Utilities, a free all-in-one utility, is a terrific collection of system tools and utilities to fix, speed up, maintain and protect your PC. Personal experience with this application for the last 2 years has convinced me that a typical user can really benefit by having this application on their system. With this free program you can tweak, repair, optimize and improve your system’s performance; and its ease of operation makes it ideal for less experienced users.

Revo Uninstaller:

Revo Uninstaller is a superior program to uninstall programs from your computer. This free program with its advanced and fast algorithm scans before, and after you uninstall an application. After the program’s regular uninstaller runs, you can remove additional unnecessary files, folders and registry keys that are usually left over (those “orphaned” registry entries we talked about earlier), on your computer. This feature is a definite plus.

Have a great school year!

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17 Free Productivity Applications That Make Life Easier

The Internet is loaded with free software, but it seems to me, that most free software is either security related, or system related. There’s nothing wrong with that of course; but because freeware offerings are heavily weighted in favor of these types of applications, productivity applications tend to get lost in the fog.

As a consequence, you might think that you have to wander the aisles of your local computer store to find good quality productivity software. But, you don’t.

There’s a wealth of tried and tested free productivity software out in the wild blue of the Internet, that will meet virtually every need you’re likely to have.

Take a look at the following recommended free downloads and I think you’ll find that these applications will more than do the job.

Working with words:

OpenOffice.org 3

OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers.

It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages.

AbiWord

If you want to go light on a word processor then AbiWord is for you. AbiWord, an open source application, has been designed to integrate perfectly with the operating system it runs on, and there are many, including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X (PowerPC).

There’s no need to worry about document compatibility issues with AbiWord since it can read, and write, all industry standard document types, including Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, Office Open XML (MS Word 2007), Rich Text Format (RTF), HTML web pages, and many more.

WordWeb

WordWeb is a handy utility that gives you the definition, synonyms, and antonyms of any given word without requiring you to go online, though it can connect to the Internet for expanded functionality should you want it.

If you’re a writer, a student, or you just want to find the right word to get the right message across, then the free WordWeb Thesaurus and Dictionary for Windows application will be invaluable.

PDF Tools:

PDFill PDF Tools

Included are Merge, Split, Reorder, Encrypt, Decrypt, Rotate, Crop, Reformat, Header, Footer, Watermark, Images to PDF, PDF to Images, Form Fields Delete/Flatten/List, PostScript to PDF, PDF Information, Scan to PDF, and Create Transparent Image options.

PrimoPDF

Create PDF files faster with the only free PDF creator to support one-click, drag-and-drop PDF creation. Convert to PDF from any file you can print, including Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats.

Desktop Publishing:

SerifSoft PagePlus SE

Interested in producing a family newsletter, a business newsletter, a company newsletter or an employee newsletter? Want to produce a clean, bright design that will enhance your newsletter’s message? Want to do it for FREE?

This neat little Desktop Publishing application includes a range of preset document layouts, automated templates, great color schemes and artistic effects, which will allow you to produce professional looking results.

Satisfy your creativity with drawing applications:

Inkscape

An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface.

It’s very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.

Blender 3D – Open Source Animation to the Max

Blender is an incredibly robust 3D software animation program. It’s been designed for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulating, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications.

Google SketchUp 7

Google SketchUp is software that you can use to create 3D models of anything you like. Build models and add them to Google Earth. Most people get rolling with SketchUp in just a few minutes. Dozens of video tutorials, an extensive Help Center and a worldwide user community mean that anyone who wants to make 3D models with SketchUp, can. Redecorate your living room. Design a new piece of furniture. Model your city for Google Earth.

You can build models from scratch, or you can download what you need. People all over the world share what they’ve made on the Google 3D Warehouse. It’s a huge, searchable repository of models, and it’s free.

Working with photos:

Google Picasa

At its most basic, it’s a photo manager and viewer. Fire up Picasa, and you can browse through all of your photos, organized by folder, as well as by the year they were stored on your hard disk.

But all that is just a start. It also has a full complement of editing tools, and lets you create CDs full of photos, as well as photo collages, screensavers, and posters. It will upload your files Google’s Web albums photo site, publish your photos to your Blogger blog, and plenty more as well.

XnView

With XnView you can import more than 400 graphic file formats then convert them to other formats such as GIF, BMP, JPG, PNG, multi page TIFF. As well, you can export more than 50 graphic file formats.

XnView doesn’t stop there however; it also provides you with more advanced features such as Web page creation, contact prints, multiple conversion (format and transformation), slide shows, screen capturing and twain support for scanners and digital cameras.

Web site creation:

Weebly

If you’re looking to create that first web site using a WYSIWYG visual web page creator, and you want to do it for free, including web hosting, then this free service from Weebly will fill the bill admirably. With Weebly you control virtually every essential aspect of site design – and built-in integration with Google AdSense, allows you to deliver text and image ads that are specific to your site and your site content, if you choose.

Media applications:

Audacity

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Definitely the best of breed.

Winamp

A multimedia player that supports numerous audio and video formats. It also plays streamed video and audio content, live and recorded, authored worldwide.

Mapping Software:

Google Earth

Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places, and share with others.

Mind mapping software:

FreeMind

FreeMind is an open source mind mapping software that enables you to visualize ideas, projects, concepts, brainstorming, internet research or any other task that can benefit from a structured overview. You can create nodes with child and sibling nodes and add icons, clouds, notes and custom formatting for better presentation.

The nodes can be expanded or collapsed, or interactively linked to local files, other maps, online resources and more. You can also insert encrypted nodes or create encrypted maps for sensitive projects. The finished maps can be exported to HTML, clickable XHTML, Open Office document, image file and other formats.

Control your cash:

AceMoney Lite

AceMoney Lite is a freeware personal finance manager. It has all the features of its big brother except multiple accounts management. As AceMoney, AceMoney Lite helps people organize and manage their personal finances quickly and easily. It supports all the features required for home or even small-business accounting needs.

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Download Photoscape – Intuitive Photo Freeware

Most of us don’t need the power of a high end (read: expensive), photo editor like Adobe Photoshop, the trendsetter/innovator for all photo editor and image manipulation software.

Instead, we’re looking for an application that’s small, fast, and hopefully free, with an intuitive interface that’s easy to use; especially for those with only modest previous experience.

Photoscape, last updated May 29, 2010, is a free photo editing application with a drag and drop interface, that meets, and in fact, exceeds those requirements.

You don’t have to take advantage of all of the powerful features built into this impressive application of course – see fast facts below. You can just stick to those tools you are most familiar with, including resizing, cropping, correcting red eye, .…………

As well, you can perform a wide variety of additional image adjustments, including brightness, contrast, and applying a host of special effects.

An unusual aspect of the Photoscape opening screen interface is its circular layout, as this screen capture illustrates. A very cool presentation!

Photoscape offers feature rich online help, supplemented with video for those of us who are into, “show me how” mode. The following screen capture illustrates the video running the Bright/Contrast help feature. I give this a big “thumbs up”.

Photoscape Fast Facts:

Viewer: View photos in your folder, create a slideshow

Editor: resizing, brightness and color adjustment, white balance, backlight correction, frames, balloons, mosaic mode, adding text, drawing pictures, cropping, filters, red eye removal, blooming, clone stamp

Batch editor: Batch edit multiple photos

Page: Merge multiple photos on the page frame to create one final photo

Combine: Attach multiple photos vertically or horizontally to create one final photo

Animated GIF: Use multiple photos to create a final animated photo

Print: Print portrait shots, passport photos

Splitter: Slice a photo into several pieces

Screen Capture: Capture your screenshot and save it

Color Picker: Zoom in on images, search and pick a color

Rename: Change photo file names in batch mode

Raw Converter: Convert RAW to JPG

Paper Print: Print lined, graph, music and calendar paper

Face Search: Find similar faces on the Internet

Languages: English, Korean, Chinese, Traditional Chinese, German, Dutch, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Mexico, Latin America), French, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Colombian), Thai, Hungarian, Turkish, Catalan, Slovak, Czech, Norwegian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Swedish, Estonian, Danish, Romanian, Hebrew, Galician, Finnish, Indonesian and Arabic.

System requirements: Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/Vista/Win 7.

Download at: Download.com

For the Geeky Photographer:

Image Analyzer 1.30

If you’re a geeky photographer, then Image Analyzer could be just the program you’ve been searching for. This small (1.24MB), free, advanced, feature-rich image editor, comes complete with serious enhancement and analytical tools.

At the advanced level, this is not a program for the faint of heart, and requires a good understanding of photographic techniques. Check it out at “Free Image Analyzer 1.30 -Professional Photo Editor” on this site.

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Download MWSnap – Free, Powerful Screen Capture Utility

Tired of using the clunky Windows Alt-Printscreen command for capturing screen shots, but you don’t want to pay up to $40 to get more control over this function? Do you need more options and functionally when snapping screen shots?

Well the good news is, you don’t have to pay a penny to download and install a great little application that will allow you to do more than just capture screen shots, and that will give you the options and functionally you need.

MWSnap is a highly rated small, yet powerful, Windows program, for snapping (capturing) images from selected parts of the screen. I’ve been using this application for years, and I find it invaluable in day to day usage. I use it daily to create high-quality screen captures for presentations, documents and most particularly screen captures for my Blogs.

The user interface is very simple, and easy to follow. I must admit though, that I rarely see the interface since I generally use the “hot key” function.

Fast facts:

Image editing – basic image editing options

5 snapping modes.

Support for BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG and GIF formats, with selected color depth and quality settings.

System-wide hotkeys.

Clipboard copy/paste.

Printing.

Auto-saving, auto-printing.

Auto-start with Windows.

Minimizing to system tray.

An auto-extending list of fixed sizes, perfect for snapping images for icons and glyphs.

A zoom tool for magnifying selected parts of the screen.

A ruler tool for measuring screen objects lengths.

A color picker showing screen colors with separated RGB parts.

Fast picture viewer.

Adding frames and mouse pointer images.

Multilevel configurable undo and redo.

MWSnap does not require installation, and does not need any special drivers or system files.

Special thanks to Okie for suggesting this article.

System Requirements: any 32-bit Windows OS. I run this app on both Win 7, and XP Pro systems.

Download at: Download.com

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