effect

Photo taking apps are a dime a dozen in the App Store, but if you look a little deeper, you can make some really cool projects as long as you use some creativity.

Instead of simply giving your photos a retro look like many of the popular camera apps, there are a number of options that turn your images into a creative project in which you can use your imagination to come up with something unique.

This week's collection of apps are all about doing something different with your images on your iPhone. The first quickly turns your photos … Read more

Google announced on the company's blog today that sites that generate too many take-down notices will find themselves pushed down in the search rankings. Takedown notices are the documents that owners of copyrighted material file in order to request the deletion of unauthorized copies of their work from Web sites.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Web site owners must remove unauthorized files once they've received a legitimate takedown notice. … Read more

HipGeo Travel Blog and Trip Journal (free) lets you tell the story of your vacation with images, videos, text, tags, and more all tied to your geolocation. You start by signing up through Facebook or Twitter, then you can choose people to share your travels with. If you just want to see the app in action before you take your trip (and see best practices from other users) you can use an explore button to check out blogs of popular or featured users, or look at posts from near your location.… Read more

Instacollage lets you combine and manipulate multiple photos into a single collage before sharing with your social networks. It gives you 18 different collage styles to choose from, including a single square picture layout (similar to Instagram), and layouts with up to four different panels of varying arrangements. After you pick your style, the empty collage template pops up so you can add your photos to the panels. The interface here is perfect, as it lets you simply tap a panel to insert a photo from your gallery, then drag and pinch to move and resize. Unfortunately, though, Instacollage does … Read more

Graphics tools that can create photo mosaics aren't scarce, even when filtered down to freeware. Mosaizer Pro by APP Helmond does that. But this free tool earns a spot even in the most well-stocked graphics toolkit by taking photo mosaics -- pictures created out of many smaller pictures -- to new levels. With it, you can "paint with pictures," creating artistic images out of your own pictures using Mosaizer's tools and vast library of free images, patterns, and textures. You can also add your own objects and save your settings as projects you can return to. … Read more

It may not beat Photoshop, but Aviary is still one of the most comprehensive photo editors available for Android. What's more, it's incredibly simple to use.

From the get-go, Aviary makes it simple to edit your photos, as it opens up directly to a carousel of all the saved images on your device. From here, you can swipe through your photos straight away or go to your photo gallery and make your selection that way. Otherwise, the app also gives you the option to take a new photo to import into the editor.

Once you make your selection, … Read more

If you've ever tried to create some "easy" photo effects using a not-so-easy tool, you'll appreciate Easy Photo Effects, a free tool that actually makes it easy to apply cool effects to your digital photos. It handles basic chores like resizing and adding borders and adjusting brightness and contrast, but it also has interesting filters such as sepia, colored grid, and embossed effects. With easy-to-access settings for each individual effect and a prominent Undo button, Easy Photo Effects lets you quickly apply, view, and change effects until you get it right. Easy Photo Effects only handles … Read more

Today's headline roundup will have you worried about Terminator cats targeting rich Mac users via their Facebook email addresses:

The engineers at the super secret Google X lab have created the self-driving car and the augmented reality Google glasses. This time, while trying to push the limits of technology, they may have started to create Skynet. Google engineers strung 16,000 computer processors together, and then set the network free on the Internet. The New York Times explains that the system began to learn... about cats. Google engineers never told the computer what a cat was, it just picked … Read more

Instagram is a free and fairly simple photo enhancement app that requires only a couple of touches to produce great-looking images. But what's really special about Instagram are the sharing capabilities that let you tell the story of your life through photos.

Start by signing up with Instagram with an e-mail address, username, and password. From there you can configure Instagram to autopost to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare, and Posterous, or just choose to share images from within the app or via e-mail. You can also turn any of these options on or off if you don't … Read more