More Free Stuff for Your Pictures

Pretty much as soon as I posted my first list of excellent free software to use with your photos I thought of more to add. So at no extra cost here are some bonus free software image tools that you shouldn't be without.

Paint.net - This is a key piece of software on my laptop. For quick and sometimes surprisingly advanced editing on the cheap, it is very hard to beat.

Boasting layers [a-la Photoshop] and some handy effects you can do a lot with this baby.

The interface has a nice modern feel too and you can move around tool palettes just like the 'serious' image editing programs.

Andrea Mosaic - You may have seen cool photos made up of many, many smaller images. Andrea Mosaic will take your images, or if you don't have a large collection you can download a starter pack of images with the program, and start building mosaics.

Mosaics are especially good when printed out because of the amount of fine details included in them. And with that in mind they make great gifts too.

Autostitch - Panoramas are a great way to capture a big scene that just won't fit into a single frame; You take multiple shots of a scene and use a stitcher to blend them into one large photo.

Autostitch is a fast stitching program and it often works better than the panorama tool in Photoshop.

The interface is very minimal, but don't let that put you off as the results make up for it. On stitching jobs with a lot of high resolution images Autostitch can run very slow so to save time, first run the program set to make a small size panorama. If that works out OK you can go back and run the program again for a full-size panorama.

Preset Paradise

I've mentioned Lightroom and few times and that's for an important reason; it's the hub for managing and processing all my digital images. Hand's down it's one of the best tools that lets a photographer focus on taking photos and not spend hours plonked in front of Photoshop.

One of the features of Lightroom that saves a huge amount of time is the use of presets. Lightroom ships with some built-in presets, but it's very easy to make your own. Presets are also flexible so you can continue to make fine adjustments once a preset has been applied.

Here for your enjoyment are two of my own presets for you to download and try on your images.

They're completely free to use but if you do like them and post images using them please link back to this post.

Instructions for loading them into Lightroom are at the bottom, for now let's take a look...!

Liberty Street Preset - I give presents interesting names based on the location where I took the photo that the preset was first created for. In this case it was along Liberty Street in downtown Toronto.

Here's how the preset looks...

before

after

I like the rich look to the metallic parts of the image and this is a black and white preset I use a lot.

Hearn Look - This is a strong duotone style conversion that I found adds a lot of atmosphere to shots with heavy industry or decay in them.

before

after

To install presets into Lightroom simply launch the program and in the Develop module right-click in the list of presets already loaded. In the popup menu select 'Import' and navigate to where you saved the downloaded presets. Done!

Enjoy.