You’ll never be able to detect the difference between an eight-megapixel and a 12-megapixel photo when looking at the picture on a computer screen, for example, because your monitor only shows about one or two megapixels of information anyway. So unless you’re making poster-sized prints or doing a lot of deep zooming and cropping, who cares how many pixels there are?

This week, I thought it would be fun to do it the old-fashioned way and actually “paint” with a flashlight.

Use Adobe Photoshop Elements or another image editor to add picture frames, drop shadows, and other border effects to digital photos.

Cool fx is a image-editing app by photo industry veterans The Tiffen Company. In its App Store description, Cool fx promises to simulate different colour and black-and-white photographic looks, diffusion, motion picture and film stocks, and optical lab processes. It certainly delivers on that promise –perhaps too much so for some users.

Image stabilization technology in cameras and in lenses has revolutionized digital photography, enabling photographers to get dramatically sharper photos without hauling around a tripod. But it’s not obvious how to use a digital SLR’s image-stabilized lens–after all, the very fact that it has an on/off switch implies you shouldn’t leave the feature on all the time.

Photographers love to talk about the “magic hour” in the morning and late afternoon when the sun is perfectly positioned for awe-inspiring photos. Listen to enough of that sort of talk, and you’ll start to believe that early morning and dusk are the only times of day you could possibly get any good photos at all.

On the upside, you don’t have to install anything, and you can edit your photos anywhere you have an Internet connection. The downside? Just what you’d expect: these programs generally offer only a fraction of the features found in stand-alone image editors like Photoshop, and you can’t work without an Internet connection.

By Jeff Bertolucci PC World (US) January 21, 2009 SAN FRANCISCO  – Reliability and Service: Printers Printers in 2008 were slightly more reliable than desktops or laptops, according to our survey participants. About 3 in 10 respondents reported having one or more significant hardware or software problems with their printers during the preceding year. That [...]

By Melissa Riofrio PC World (US) December 10, 2008 SAN FRANCISCO – Canon’s Pixma MP620 color inkjet multifunction printer offers connectivity and capacity galore. While its design has a few shortcomings, overall the Pixma MP620 offers a good deal, especially for a busy home or school setting. A few premium features distinguish the silvery Pixma [...]

By Melissa Riofrio PC World (US) December 10, 2008 SAN FRANCISCO – Brother’s US$180 MFC-790CW color inkjet multifunction printer has a tempting array of goodies, but offers lackluster performance. Despite its aspirations, the MFC-790CW can’t compete with other machines in its price range, such as the HP OfficeJet J4680. Though the MFC-790CW is compact, it [...]