The Photoshop Album Starter Edition 3.2 is a great (and Free) tool to help you organize all your digital photos.

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Features

• Fix common photo flaws — like red eye, color, and brightness — in a single click.
• Easily share your memories! Attach photos to e-mail, send them to mobile phones or easily create a CD. Make your own prints, or order prints, photo books, and more online.
• Find any photo in a snap with automatic organization that lets you view all of your digital photos in one place using a familiar calendar view.

Currently only available for Windows!

Visit Adobe for more information and the free download.

PicLens is a browser plugin that enables full-screen slideshows within Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. The plugin is supported by numerous websites including:

It also comes as a WordPress plugin that allows the user to set up slideshows from the controlpanel. I’ve just tried it on Flickr and I must say it looks impressive.

You can download the browser plugin from www.piclens.com or download and try the Wordpress plugin if you are running a WordPress blog/site yourself.

Photomatix Pro merges differently exposed photos into one image with details in both highlights and shadows:

• Exposure blending
• Creation of 32-bit HDR images
• Powerful Tone Mapping tool [Examples]
• Automation with easy-to-use Batch Processing [Tutorial] [Features list]

The trial is fully functional and never expires, but applies a watermark to images produced with one of the two Tone Mapping methods and four of the six exposure blending modes.

Download page: Photomatix Pro for Windows

Download page: Photomatix Pro for Mac OS X (Universal Binary)

The examples are very professional looking but I thought I’d give it a go myself as well. The only problem is that I’m not really a very good photographer. Also my camera is way to old and simple and doesn’t include the possibilities to take photos with different exposures.

So in my first experiment I simply took one of my photos (Andalucia, Spain - overlooking the Mediterranean and the city of Fuengirola) and made 2 more versions using Photoshop. One copy where I darkened the photo and one where I brightened it. Then I simply followed the tutorial and made my first HDR image. The original and the end result are displayed below.

Photomatix Pro also comes as a Photoshop plugin, and I must admit I’m very impressed with the possibilities this application seams to offer. As you can see (I hope) the end result is almost like a painting, and could be hanging above the fireplace anywhere.

Job for computer engineering…

This 3 and a half minute video shows how a VERY skilled Photoshop artist draws Albert Einstein in just 4 hours.

Simply amazing!