Video

Photoshop CS3 for Mac is still your top choice if you're serious about image editing. Loaded with features for color-correction, photo enhancements, filters, effects, and layer management, Photoshop is the pro-level image-editing software to measure all others by. If you'd like a closer look at some of the features Photoshop CS3 has to offer, check out our First Look video to see if you're ready to download the trial.

Cooliris for Firefox (formerly PicLens) is an add-on for Firefox that makes viewing images much more elegant and fun. Once installed, you can simply perform a search for images at a Cooliris-enabled site--like Google, Flikr, or Amazon--to bring up a full-screen 3D wall of results. Grab the bar at the bottom to watch your wall of results scroll by smoothly on your screen. When you find an image or movie you like, click on it to get a larger view. Cooliris also lets you search from within the interface by category or by site with its Discovery tools.

For more … Read more

As with its sibling, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements Adobe pushes the Web subscription message a bit too hard. Take, for instance, the Welcome screen, which is your first encounter with either one of the applications. The InstantMovie, Open Project, and New Project options get relegated to a task bar that's relatively inconspicuous compared with the large, rotating slide show heralding the many benefits of the free and $49.99 Plus membership for Photoshop.com (more project templates, remote access, and 20GB-plus of storage space). Adobe might as well have sold the space as an ad; it's that … Read more

Though this multifaceted burning tool won't win any beauty awards, it has almost everything Windows users need to create CDs and DVDs. One of the most glaring holes in Windows XP is a good DVD burner program, and CDBurnerXP Pro fits the bill well. Despite a slightly confusing interface, this freeware tool should not disappoint users who take the time to familiarize themselves with its functionality.

The core of the program's feature set consists of three main tasks, which are prompted via a wizard upon start-up: writing data CDs and DVDs, creating CDs for audio playback, and ripping … Read more

As old as it is, iTunes isn't the oldest free media player around. Since it was married to the iPod, though, there's been no denying that it's the industry standard for multipurpose jukebox software and that the program has become practically synonymous with media playback. Available for Windows and Mac, iTunes handles music and video equally well in a clean layout.

The bundling with the iPod and iPhone have made it the powerhouse that it is: neither device will function unless you connect it to iTunes first. The connections to the iTunes Store and App Store are … Read more

One piece of advice that should've been obvious to participants of last weekend's Rental Car Rally from Long Island City, New York, to Montreal, Quebec: use GPS.

Or so I figured, as one member of a three-person team equipped with a MacBook, an EVDO card, a GPS navigator, a backup GPS navigator, and a radar detector to know when authorities were nearby in case we, uh, pushed the speed limit a little bit. (We only used that in New York state, though, because radar detectors are illegal in Vermont and Quebec.)

The surprising truth? A large number of the driving squads had nothing but paper maps on them, making the overnight rally--with six backroad checkpoints, most of which were marked with nothing but a set of coordinates, to ensure that you couldn't just take I-87 the whole way--a pretty difficult affair.

But even with GPS, there was some head-scratching when everyone's Garmins and TomToms navigated them right to the shores of Lake Champlain and recommended that they take a ferry. The gadgets were right: teams that drove onto the Grand Isle ferry arrived in Montreal hours before teams that chose to drive around the lake.

As for the teams that opted for maps over GPS, most of them made it...eventually.… Read more

Want to watch AVIs, MPEGs, and other movie files on your iPod? iSquint is a free utility that can help you do just that, without the need for QuickTime Pro. From the makers of the more feature-packed VisualHub, iSquint has a simple, streamlined interface that's designed around the app's basic, hassle-free functionality.

You just drag all the files that you want converted into the iSquint window, choose whether you want to optimize for iPod or TV viewing, and you're off. iSquint can give you even faster and better compression than QuickTime, especially when you choose H.264 … Read more

ooVoo is an iChat-like video conferencing and chat tool for Windows, loaded with useful, powerful tools that make it a viable alternative for small work groups using conference calls and screen-sharing applications. A recording feature lets users tape video chats with other participants. Since the video and audio are being recorded to the hard drive, the only time limit is how much free space the computer's hard drive has. In testing, a nearly 15-minute, four-way video conversation only took up 95MB, which ooVoo can convert into a workable FLV file.

A conference calling tool gives host and participants a … Read more

Whether you're looking to change a video format to save space or because you lack a necessary codec, the freeware FormatFactory could be the last converter you'll need. It's not perfect, but it handles 12 types of video formats, six audio types, eight image formats, and DVD/ISO conversions with speed and accuracy.

The interface is simple and utilitarian, although spiked with format-icons and a big banner announcing the program's name for no reason other than to put lipstick on the pig. The left navigation menu has collapsible links to the various formats you can convert … Read more