Tze Chuen’s Weblog

A reader recently sent me an email asking how can she watermark her artwork with free or cheap software. After having done a quick google search, I’ve found a software that’s both free and easy to use.

Introducing Kigo Image Converter 2.0, this program allows to resize and watermark your images in a few easy steps.

First of all, download the app here.

Upon launching the application, drag all your images into the white box area of the app. Choose the ‘General’ tab under ‘Convert Settings’ and choose your desired Output format (or leave it at default as jpg). Choose your output folder - this is where your watermarked images are gonna be put in.

Choose the ‘Watermark’ tab. Choose image and then Browse… and choose your watermark file. Then choose the preferred alignment (Top left,right, bottom left,right, center etc). After you’re done setting up, click the CONVERT button.

Your watermarked/resized images should be in the folder that you’ve assigned the app to save in.

Hope you find much use with this tech tip. Feel free to email me any geeky or techie questions. :)

Photoshop is probably one of the most well known software for the computer. Almost everyone knows what’s it for. Heck, even my grandma has a retouched picture of herself hanging on her walls. She would tell you that the picture was taken 30 years ago. Obviously nobody believed her! ;)

Adobe just launched a free web service called Photoshop Express. It gives you 2GB of free photo storage so you could store all your favorite Yua Aida pictures. Of course, that’s not what made Photoshop Express special, rather it is a web app that allows you to store and do simple edits to your photos. Tasks such as cropping only require a few clicks. If you frequently crop your pictures for your Facebook profile, then Photoshop Express is your best friend. Sure, you can probably do the same task with MS Paint, but Photoshop Express has integration with Facebook, PhotoBucket and Picasa. This means that you can edit your stored photos in any of those mentioned web services right from Photoshop Express!

Here you can see cropping and rotate feature in action. It’s really simple.

Photoshop Express may not be for the expert users, but if you’re someone like me who needs to crop or touch up images every now and then, Photoshop Express is the perfect tool.

However, one thing I didn’t like about Photoshop Express was it didn’t accept PNG files. I mean, come on, how hard is it to support PNG files?

If you wanna try out Photoshop Express, click here.

P/S: Sorry about the poor quality screenshots, looks like I’ll never use Resize ‘Em All again.

Yesterday I received an email from Evernote saying that I was invited to beta test their app. Evernote is an app for both Windows and Mac platforms that allows you to keep both text and image notes in Evernote’s servers. You can then refer back to them when needed.

What attracted me about Evernote was not that it allows you to keep your love letters from your ex-lovers. It was the text in image recognition technology. Initially, I thought that this tech is built into their app. However, after using the app itself I was slightly disappointed because the text in image recognition is actually done server-side, meaning all those tech stuff is actually being done on Evernote’s servers and not right on their app.

How it works is every few minutes your app synchronizes with Evernote’s servers uploading changes (such as additions of new notes). It takes a while before those text in image recognition process is done on your newly uploaded pictures. I’m guessing every few minutes the servers undergoes the process of “tagging” all the newly uploaded images by users. So it’s actually a matter of luck how long it takes for your images to get synced.

However, I don’t think the “few minutes delay” thing matters because the use of this technology is to allow you to search images that contain words that you remember. Unless your memory span is less than a few minutes, then you shouldn’t be worry about this.

This is how Evernote’s Mac app look like.

To test out how Evernote recognizes text in images, I used the “New Snapshot Note” feature and took a quick webcam shot thru my built-in iSight. I took a picture holding up Uncle Toby’s “what I eat for breakfast when I’m running late for classes”.

Right here you can see that it recognizes the word “Apricot” very well and highlights the word Safari-style. Other words that worked was “Uncle”, “Yoghurt” and the first few numbers of best before date. Anything smaller than the word “Apricot” was not recognized. Fair enough, those words are too blurry anyway.

Next, I took a picture of my book shelf with my digital camera and made sure the picture wasn’t too blurry.

As you can see, the smaller words such as “Socks” could be recognized.

Here, you can see that even vertical words can be recognized! This holds true for most of the words that appear on this picture except for those that are half-shadowed.

Just for fun, I typed in all alphabets a to z in the search box to yield all alphabetical results. Here you can see what words were picked up by Evernote’s text in image recognition system. It’s not too bad for a consumer-based product!

Of course, this is just one of Evernote’s many cool features. If you’re interested to know more, head on to www.evernote.com!

P/S: Evernote is currently invitation-only beta.