multifarious mushrooms

This is freeware.
Have you ever erased a photo from your digital camera by mistake? Well you can retrieve it with PC Inspector Smart recovery. You can do that via your camera being hooked up with the card in it or with the card inserted into the computer. You cannot retrieve images which have been overwritten.
PC Inspector will not recover deleted video files though.
PC Inspecor has other utilies on its site in order to recover other files too.

Photoshop Express is currently in beta form and is free. I hope it stays free because it looks excellent. I can’t access it at the moment because it is only for USA residents, but here is what it says it offers:

You can use tools to crop, straighten, fix white balance and exposure, highlight, alter shadow levels, red-eye removal and sharpening. Why would one need Photoshop or Photoshop Elements?

The retouch tool is a bit like the healing brush tool in Photoshop. You can even turn a photo into a sketch.

After editing, you can store your photos on Adobe’s servers. You get 2GB of space. You get a URL like this: http://……………………. .photoshop.com

There is a trend to store your data on the web, rather than your PC, so that if your computer crashes and you haven’t backed up (and how many of us do this regularly enough), you will still have access to your data.

1. All data related to your own web sites and blogs are generally on your host’s servers.

2. If you use web mail, like gmail, your emails are on the web. I advise forwarding many of your important emails to gmail. There’s certainly enough space for them.

3. Google has begun the process of allowing free storage of spreadsheets, word processing, maps and videos.

4. Images, videos and podcasts can be stored on web pages.

5. I have heard of places where you can store data for a fee.

Now Microsoft, in its eternal competition with google, is using a beta form of this, called Live Mesh, but it will cost. It is currently offering 5GB of online storage to 10,000 people in this beta form.

Facebook and My Space are joining the race also. They allow third party developers to write applications for them.

Google is rumoured to be developing a web based operating system that ties all of it’s online applications together. It already has Google Gears which allows access to Google applications while offline.

Amazon too allows huge storage on its servers.

To see the video which Microsoft has developed for it’s Live Mesh you can visit it at Live Mesh

Who would use these storage spaces for a fee though, when so much is free on Google? We’ll have to wait and see. I’d certainly spend time moving most of my stuff over to a storage space on-line. This seems to be the trend, so get going folks! No more worrying about PCs crashing.

Using Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 again, here is how you can automatically adjust the skin tone of a person in a photo. This photo is of me taken with flash after a 40 degree day and after finally getting into the air conditioned Rod Laver Arena at the Australian Open tennis at a night session. Obviously I’m not looking my best.

By the way I have used the TNT screen capture to take that screen shot. I think it’s worth buying.

Anyway, my face is pale.

So I can go to Enhance> Adjust Color> Adjust Color for Skin Tone and click on the face.  You can do that automatically, or use the sliders to do it manually.

You can now see the difference in skin tone. Hey I don’t think I’m a purist anymore about photos, but I’m sorry to have to inflict that awful photo as a demonstration on you.

I downloaded a 30 day trial of the TNT screen capture utility. It is great! Much better than anything else out there for free.

Here’s what it can do

· Capture anything and everything
· Editing tools and graphical object
· XP screenshots with rounded corners
· Smooth resizing - no jaggy edges
· Capture mouse pointer with shadow
· Drop shadows, transparency and more
· Screenshots with irregular shapes
· Just click for default Windows colors
· Thumbnail function
· E-mail your screenshots
· Simple and intuitive user interface

So useful for tutorials!