The only downside is that it’s a little trickier to do standard tasks, so in this guide I’ll show you how to resize images while keeping their aspect ratios.

Scale Images While Retaining Aspect Ratio in Paint.NET

For this example, let’s say I wanted to add a Santa hat to President and CEO of Harley-Davidson, Keith Wandell. I first open his picture in Paint.NET, find a nice transparent .png of a Santa hat, and paste it into the image.

As you can see, we have a bit of a scaling problem.  So I’ll now grab one of the corners of the rectangle surrounding the Santa hat to resize it…

Without locking the aspect ratios (the relation between the width and the height of the image), it’s easy to stretch your image out of proportion.  That that simply will not do for this project!

So here’s the secret: To lock the aspect ratio while resizing an image, hold the Shift key and then resize the image. Now you can resize the hat and keep it looking just as it should!

Go forth now, young neophytes, and add Santa hats to the CEOs of the world!

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Image Resizer Powertoy Clone provides the solution, adding a highly useful “Resize Pictures” option when you right click any image in your operating system.  You may recognize this application from the Windows XP PowerToys pack – and you are correct, it’s basically the same application rewritten in C++.

Unlike the original PowerToy which only supported Windows XP 32-bit, this “cloned” version supports both the 32- and 64-bit version of of Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

Using the application is incredibly simple:  Right click any image (or images) you’d like to resize, select Resize Pictures, choose your desired resolution, and the resized images will appear as copies in your current working directory.  You can also specify custom resolutions and the application can edit the source images directly without making copies.

Image Resizer Powertoy Clone is free and open source for Windows XP, Vista, and 7.  [Download]

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To get started, create a free account and you’ll be taken to the video creation page.  You’ll choose from one of three themes: Classic, Scrapbook, and Holidays.

Once you’ve chosen a theme, you can get started right away by uploading images and videos from your hard drive, Flickr, Picasa, or any web URL.

Stupeflix has a really useful web editor that allows you to customize your video and add a soundtrack using MP3s from your computer.

Once you’re finished customizing your video, you can preview your work or click the Export button to finish.

Unfortunately, the free version only lets you produce 1 minute of standard definition video, but you can purchase the full length high quality version (640×360) for $3 and the high definition version (1280×720) for $5.

You can check out my mindblowing holiday video, as well as some slightly better produced videos for the Classic, Scrapbook, and Holiday themes.

I’ve had a lot of fun with Stupeflix Studio so far and I think it has a great potential for people who want to share digital scrapbooks and photo albums but don’t want to buy professional software.

The post Turn Your Digital Media into Web Video with Stupeflix Studio first appeared on Techerator.

Aviary.com is one of the most significant websites I’ve seen in a while.  It offers multiple image editing applications online, right from their site.  Best of all, their main set of image editing applications are provided for free, like an online Photoshop suite!

I could talk about all of Aviary’s features for quite some time, but the feature I’ve found to be most important is the Falcon application, or web capturing feature.  I don’t claim my past methods of capturing web pages were the most efficient (i.e. using Vista’s Snipping Tool or worse yet, copy/pasting Print Screens together with Microsoft Paint), but I’m sure none are easier than using Aviary.

Here’s an example of how Aviary can be used: YouTube’s front page is constantly changing with the statistics of the videos within the ‘Videos Being Watched Now’ and the ‘Most Popular’ sections.  If you load up YouTube and become upset when you see that “Fred” is taking up more than 3 different areas of the Most Popular section, you might want to share your concerns with a friend.  If your buddy isn’t able to get to a computer at the moment, you can use Aviary to quickly give them your proof.

Simply type in “http://aviary.com/” before any standard URL (such as: http://aviary.com/youtube.com) and you will be provided with a capture of the entire page without your operating system or web browser buttons interfering.  With the optional Talon Add-on for Firefox, just right-clicking an area of the website will give you the options to capture a region, visible portion, or the entire page you’re currently on, which makes using Aviary for captures easier yet.

After capturing an image using the Take Screenshot option in the right-click menu, you will be given the option to copy the image to your clipboard, save it to your desktop, or choose to edit the image (which redirects you to Aviary’s image editor).  If you click to edit the capture, you can use the editor (Falcon) to add lines or other indicators to point out your focus of the page to whomever you’re sharing with.

Aviary’s site is filled with many useful, Photoshop-style applications and features that make image editing and screen captures a breeze.  Though all the tools are officially still in the Beta stage, I’ve experienced no problems yet while using the site.  If you need help, several tutorials are available to help you kick-start your editing skills.

Aviary provides a simple and effective way to capture screenshots of web pages, and I recommend test driving the site and it’s free web-based applications next time you need to edit or capture an image.

The post Aviary Makes Online Image Capturing and Editing Easy first appeared on Techerator.