But leaving productivity aside, the main question I had was how to manage wallpapers on a dual monitor system. Can you have a different image on each one of them? How do you stretch a single photo between both screens? The answer is DisplayFusion, an excellent wallpaper manager that’s been specifically developed to work with two screens.

With DisplayFusion you can choose between having a single background image stretched over the two monitors or using a different image for each one of them. You can also set the alignment and the background color for each monitor. The program features a preview window where you can see how the selected image or images will look on the two monitors.

DisplayFusion also includes a built-in photo search tool that retrieves images from Flickr according to your Dual Screen Wallpaper for a excellent collection of desktop wallpapers designed for dual monitor systems.

• Instantizer – Fill in a simple form with a photo from your hard drive, a custom message and an optional rotation degree, and you’ll get an instant Polaroid with a link that’s valid for 24 hours. Simple, yet effective.
• Photo Notes -  Select a photo from your PC or a website and transform it into a Polaroid with a few extra options: custom text message, image position, rotation, text font, etc. You can also share it by email or publish it on a web gallery.
• Rollip – A popular website that lets you create Polaroids with color effects, decorations and a custom message in three easy steps. The image is immediately available for download or sharing online in an email, IM or blog.
• Poladroid – If you prefer using software, this is the tool you need. Drag and drop any image on Poladroid’s interface and the program will transform it into a Polaroid right away. You can even shake the file to make it appear faster, like the real Polaroids!

Last but not least, here are a couple of Photoshop tutorials I wrote a while ago that also let you apply the beauty of Polaroids to your photos: one tutorial to create a nice Polaroid collage with different images, and another one to transform a single photo into a bunch of Polaroids scattered all over the screen.

FILEminimizer Pictures is a handy utility which lets you compress images, significantly reducing filesize without losing much in the way of quality.

How do I get my license?

To get a license for FILEminimizer Pictures all you have to do is leave a comment on this blog post, making sure that you include a valid email address.

UPDATE: there was a great response to this giveaway, and as of Wednesday afternoon, we’ve now run out of licenses. You can buy the full version from Softonic here.

The program is priced at €24.95 (€17.22 from Softonic) but, thanks to the developer (and OnSoftware!) you can get the full version for free. Hurry up, and don’t forget to tell your friends. The offer is open until September 30th, or when the licenses run out.

1. First of all, you need to take a few pictures of yourself. A couple of things to take into account in this photo session: first, they should all be taken in exactly the same place, without moving the camera a single inch; and second, they should all have the same light values, so configure your camera settings accordingly. Take as many photos as clones you want to create, posing in a different position each time.

2. Open all the images in Photoshop. Select one of them with Ctrl+A and paste it on top of another, so that it’s added as a new layer.

First, go to Google Maps and find the image you want. It’s best if you find it manually, and once you have, click Satellite, and turn of the labels, so your map is clean. Then click Link and copy the HTML code as below.

Now, open your text editor, like Notepad, and paste in the HTML. All you have to do is change the width and height values in the code – something much bigger than your screen, like 3000 x 3000 pixels – and then save it as “filename.html” .

Now, find this saved HTML file and drag it into Firefox. You should see the map open now! To save the entire image, click the Screengrab! icon, choose save and the ‘complete page/frame’ option. Make sure to save the file somewhere you’ll remember. I chose suck a big size as the image is saved with navigation arrows in the top right corner, and saving a larger area than you need means you can edit this out.

Now you’ll have a huge high quality image, that you can trim using any image editor and set as your wallpaper.

[Via: OnSoftware DE]

Live Movie Maker is part of the Microsoft Live family: a basic and functional video editor with a visually appealing interface that doesn’t require any technical skills to use. Unlike other more professional video editing tools, Live Movie Maker doesn’t feature a timeline or complicated menus. Its interface is divided into two main areas (a built-in player to preview your video, and a library to drag and drop images and videos) and has adopted the characteristic ribbon interface from the latest Microsoft apps, with separate tabs for the program’s main areas: Home, Animations, Visual effects, View and Edit.

Creating a video with your photos in Live Movie Maker couldn’t be easier: after launching the program, double click the library pane or drag and dr0p media files onto it, and they’ll be automatically added to the movie. Click the ‘Add music‘ button if you want to have some nice background music, which you can later on adjust to the video length with the ‘Fit to music’ option. Other tools you can find in this Home tab let you insert titles, add credits at the end of the movie and insert text captions for each photo. A special feature that is also worth noting is ‘AutoMovie‘: it creates the complete movie automatically for you, with title, credits and crossfade transitions.

This simple application lets you easily improve the quality of the pictures you take with your mobile phone by reducing noise, applying some sharpening and enhancing color. Of course, we’re talking about small improvements here: Mobile Photo Enhancer won’t turn your mobile photo into an impressive Pulitzer deserving shot, but at least you’ll be able to make it look better than the original picture.

Mobile Photo Enhancer includes two different executable files: one to work with one single photo and another one to process multiple images simultaneously. Unless all of your photos are quite similar and you’re sure they all require the same adjustments, I’d advise to use the single-photo version, because you may have to try a few times with different adjustments before obtaining a satisfying result.

I didn’t expect to like Bing, but I have to admit it’s a pretty cool search engine. I’m still using Microsoft’s new wannabe is the great background images.

With the free Bing Downloader, you can quickly grab every day’s Bing backgrounds just by opening it. It doesn’t need an installation, just double click the EXE file to go. Download it free here. Once you have, wherever you keep the EXE file, create a folder in the same place called “BingImages”. All the images will then be automatically saved there.

It only takes a moment to open it, and doing so daily, you’ll soon have a ton of great looking wallpaper images! There are three every day – did you know there are three different local versions of Bing? I had no idea, but US, Japan and the rest of the world (International) each get different backgrounds.