THE BIG PICTURE

The maker of “Snap Art” says the Sept. 15th cover of New Yorker Magazine was done with his program. “I’d recognize my baby anywhere,” he says. The New Yorker is famed for its artful covers and many people have them framed. The editors are silent on whether that particular cover was done with Snap Art, a plug-in program for Adobe Photoshop…

SLIDESHOWS THAT PLAY ON YOUR TV

You’ve made a photo slideshow on a disk, but will that disk play on your TV? If you have Vista, you can use the free Windows “DVD Maker” to do the trick. If you don’t, you need a program like Roxio’s “MyDVD Video Lab,” to make your video playable on a TV…

INSTANT ALBUMS

We came across a set of mini CDs for creating instant photo slideshows. They’re called “Fun Photo CD!” and

they cost $5 each from FunPhotoCD.com (and probably less from discount stores)…

GREAT FREE PHOTO EDITOR

One of our favorite photo editors is the free Picasa program from Google. This was just upgraded to version 3 (still free) and has some impressive new features…

FREE PHOTOSHOP

Most of the people who buy Adobe’s popular Photoshop program use only about 10 percent of its power. That’s too bad, because it’s an expensive program (around $650) and you can edit photos (the primary use) with many programs costing a lot less. In fact you can even get Photoshop itself for a lot less: How about free? The free version is called “Photoshop Express,” and you can get it by going to Photoshop.com/express. ..

STRANGE VIDEOS

Go to Deke.com to see Deke McClellan, the author of 80 computer books, deliver “101 Photoshop Tipsin Five Minutes…”

SHOWING UP

Shwup.com is a free web site that hopes its name will make you think of ”showing up…”

INTERNUTS

Idsupra.com for legal documents and MyPhotoPipe.com for huge photos.

HIDE THOSE PHOTOS

“Hide Photos” is a $30 program that lets you hide any of the pictures in your computer with the touch of a key…

BOOKS

“Digital Astrophotography, A Guide to Capturing the Cosmos” by Stefan Seip; $30 from Rocky Nook Press, RockyNook.com.

Almost everyone likes pictures of the stars and the planets. You need a telescope, of course, but once you have that, using a digital camera has big advantages…