Backup software Giveaway - Genie Timeline Pro 2013

Genie Timeline 2013 Pro is a backup/restore tool aimed at providing complete, seamless and reliable backups and restores. Genie Timeline makes it easy to continuously protect all your files no matter where they are stored; on your computer, external and network drives. Genie Timeline works automatically to protect new and changed files without any intervention.

Key features:

• Configure your backup in 3 simple steps and you’re done! It scans for all your file selections from any location, monitors for new and changed files, and backs them up;
• Use the Timeline to view and restore your files at a specific point of time;
• Secure your backup with the most secure 256-AES encryption algorithm;
• Recover versions of a file or deleted files with a right-click;
• Use Genie Timeline mobile app for live feedback of your backup status or get email notifications of your backup status to your inbox;
• Use backup without compression so you can view your backed up files in their native form from any computer;
• Genie Timeline offers advanced settings to ensure that power users have all they need in a simple, easy to use product. You can control when your backup runs or leave it to Genie’s IntelliCDP, power down your computer after backup, and much more;
• Use disaster recovery to keep your entire system safe from virus attacks, computer crashes, and more.

Giveaway available today at:  http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/genie-timeline-pro-2013/

Giveaway - Picture Collage Maker Pro 4.0.1

Picture Collage Maker Pro is a versatile and user-friendly collage creator with which you can make collages and greeting cards from digital photos and share them with friends and family. It provides 140+ collage templates for various occasions and holidays such as birthday, baby, wedding, anniversary, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year and more.
Picture Collage Maker Pro is extremely user-friendly. Unlike photography software that takes days to master, Picture Collage Maker Pro lets both seasoned collagers and new hobbyists become productive in minutes.

Giveaway available today at: http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/picture-collage-maker-4-0-1/

Krita 2.8 (digital painting) expected to be released in December

The Krita team is working really hard on the next release -- Krita 2.8, expected to be released end of December, early January.  And it's shaping up to be a memorable release! There is a host of interesting features, and many, many bug fixes as well. Let's take a look at what's coming!

Tablet Support

Krita has relied on Qt's graphics tablet support since Krita 2.0. We consciously dropped our own X11-level code in favour of the cross-platform API that Qt offered. And apart from the lack of support for non-Wacom tablets, this was mostly enough on X11. On Windows, the story was different, and we were confronted by problems with offsets, bad performance, no support for tablets with built-in digitizers like the Lenovo Helix.
So, with leaden shoes, we decided to dive in, and do our own tablet support. This was mostly done by Dmitry Kazakov during a week-long visit to Deventer, sponsored by the Krita Foundation. We now have our own code on X11 and Windows. Drawing is much, much smoother because we can process much more information and issues with offsets are gone.

OpenGL and Shaders

Krita was one of the first painting applications to support OpenGL to render the image. And while OpenGL gave us awesome performance when rotating, panning or zooming, rendering quality was lacking a bit.
That's because by default, OpenGL scales using some fast, but inaccurate algorithms. Basically, the user had the choice between grainy and blurry rendering.
Again, as part of his sponsored work by the Krita Foundation, Dmitry took the lead and implemented a high-quality scaling algorithm on top of the modern, shader-based architecture Boudewijn had originally implemented.
The result? Even at small zoom levels, the high-quality scaling option gives beautiful and fast results!
 
http://krita.org - Corel Painter / Adobe Photoshop alternative.

Using Blender NLE video editor

Brief tutorial (23 minutes) by Paul Caggegi that explains the basics of video editing, and shows you how to set up Blender as a Non Linear Editor. A .blend file with the windows layout and a key configuration file are available for download via the blog post.


Adding transitions

Fragmentarium, free fractal worlds explorer

Fragmentarium is an open source, cross-platform IDE for exploring pixel based graphics on the GPU. It is inspired by Adobe's Pixel Bender, but uses GLSL, and is created specifically with fractals and generative systems in mind.

Download link: http://syntopia.github.io/Fragmentarium/get.html

Features:

• Multi-tabbed IDE, with GLSL syntax highlighting
• User widgets to manipulate parameter settings
• High-resolution (tile) renderings
• Progressive rendering, for high quality AA, and distributed ray tracing.
• HDR (RGBE .HDR) support and tone mapping
• Support for simple animations
• Modular GLSL programming - include other fragments
• More than 100 examples, including 3D fractals (Mandelbulb, Mandelbox, Quaternion, Kaleidoscopic IFS), 2D fractals (Mandelbrots, Ducks, spherical Julias), Heightmaps, Knots and Hyperbolic Tesselations.

 

EArt Audio Editor - free audio editor

EArt Audio Editor is a all-in-one audio editor, recorder, converter, splitter, joiner and player. A full set of effects and editing features are included for professional sound production. When editing audio files you can copy, cut, paste and mix any portion of audio files. If required, you may add effects like Amplify, Fade In, Fade Out, Delay, Reverse, Noise Reduction, etc. MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG, VOX, RAW and many more audio formats are all supported for direct audio editing. With EArt Audio Editor you can: Edit audio files visually (Cut, Copy, Delete Selection, Delete Silence, Paste, Paste From File, Mix, Mix From File). Apply various effects (Amplify, Compressor, Delay, Equalize, Invert, Normalize, Phaser, Reverb, Reverse, Fade In, Fade Out, Flanger, Silence, Shrink, Stretch, Vibrato, and more). Apply different filters (Brand Pass Filter, High Pass Filter, Low Pass Filter, High Shelf Filter, Low Shelf Filter, Notch Filter, FFT Filter) to any selected portion of audio files. Add silence or noise. Save any portion of a audio file to disk as a new file). Play audio files or any portion of the files (Play, Pause, Continue, Stop, Play loop). Complete, multi-level undo and redo capabilities. Record audio from a microphone or any other available input device and save to WAV, MP3, WMA, OGG, VOX, RAW, etc. files. Display audio data waveform (Zoom Full, Zoom In, Zoom Out, Zoom Vertical). Open CD tracks for editing and format conversion. Add information into audio files (Album, Artist, Copyright, Genre, Title, Year, etc.)
Download link

GIMP 2.8.8 Released

GIMP 2.8.8 (Photoshop alternative | Windows, OS X, Linux) is a release in the stable 2.8 series, featuring lots of bug fixes and translation updates.

Core:
- Make sure indexed images always have a colormap
- Fix language selection via preferences on Windows
- Don’t crash on setting a large text size  
GUI:
- Keep the same image active when switching between MWM and SWM
- Make sure all dockables are properly resizable (particularly shrinkable)
- Add links to jump directly to Save/Export from the Export/Save file extension warning dialogs  
Libgimp:
- Fix GimpPickButton on OSX  
Plug-ins:
- Properly document plug-in-autocrop-layer’s PDB interface
- Fix importing of indexed BMPs  
General:
- Fix lots of places to use GIO to get proper file sizes and times on windows
- Add an AppData file for GIMP
- Backport lcms2 support from master, because lcms1 is not getting bug fixes any longer
- Lots of bug fixes
- Lots of translation updates

More details about Gimp 2.8 http://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.8.html

Gimp download link

Blender 2.69

The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.69 (3D computer graphics software).
More about Blender http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/features/

FBX import is now supported, along with improved export. New mesh modeling tools were added and existing ones improved. Cycles subsurface scattering and hair shading were improved, along with the addition of a new sky model, shading nodes and tone mapping in the viewport. The motion tracker now supports plane tracking, to track and replace flat objects in footage.

We have been testing this final release using three 'release candidates'. The official release is now available, published October 30th 2013.

Hugin 2013.0 panorama stitching

Hugin 2013.0 simplifies panorama stitching

New version of the popular panorama stitcher is now even friendlier towards beginners.
Now the user interface of Hugin has three modes: Simple (default), Advanced, and Expert. The simple UI is basically the old panorama preview dialog with panorama stitching wizard added on top of it, so you can still create a panorama in just three steps.
If you are not familiar with the procedure, it's all dead easy.
1. Add original images.

2. Launch alignment of the pictures. Hugin will attempt to discover matching features in pairs of images and re-align them.

This step is also where you pick mapping (e.g. Panini is great for architecture) and set cropping to remove "leftovers" — bits of the original images mashed with black background due to transformmations.
3. Finally, choose how you want Hugin to handle stacks of exposure bracketed images, if you have those, pick a file format to save the panorama in, and let it build the final image for you.

All the extra things like editing control points, creating masks to remove objects etc. are only visible in Advanced and Expert modes. Which is where you see the old main window of Hugin.
Frankly speaking, if you are already faimiliar with Hugin, you will probably find the user interface related changes not exactly dramatic. After all, Hugin developers preserved most of what already was there and rearranged guts in limbs in a different way (still, no drama).
Typically for Hugin, the release comes with a few new command line tools:

• pto_var, changes image variables inside PTO files;
• pto_lensstack, modifies assigned lenses and stack in PTO files;
• geocpset, sets or adds geometric constraints for multirow panoramas with featureless images.

There's of course, a number of bugfixes and smaller improvements all around. Source code and builds for various systems are available on SourceForge.

Source: Libregraphicsworld.org
Author: Alexandre Prokoudine