Daniel Grotta, Sally Wiener Grotta

Digital cameras may be advanced, but by definition they're missing one key ingredient that has long given photographers lots of creative options and control: film. And that's exactly what DxO hopes to reintroduce into images with its FilmPack 3.1.

Photographers used to choose specific “emulsions” (types of film) for a particular grain, color response, contrast, or saturation, or to create a certain look or style. To take this even further, photographers knew they could intensify particular characteristics depending on how they processed the film. Sometimes, they’d even purposely use the wrong chemicals (cross-process) for an extra punch of unexpected colors.

If social networking is important for your business, you might consider using Web-based application Nimble to manage your presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. (Nimble says that they'll be adding Google+ within 60 days). Unlike TweetDeck or HootSuite, Nimble assumes that the most important part of social networking isn't the ubiquitous stream of postings, but how the ongoing communications relate to your business relationships and building your professional network.

Nimble brings a whole new dimension to contact management, allowing a business user to develop a clearer overall picture of a client’s or prospect’s personality and needs, and to take actions to build that relationship.Setting up Nimble involves bringing together your contacts database with your social networks. Importing your contacts from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Contacts, Outlook or other (CSV) contacts applications is intuitive and hassle-free. Nimble even merges duplicate contacts from the different sources into a single record. Once that is done, whenever you open a Contact’s page, if you are connected to him/her on only some of the networks (such as Twitter and Facebook, but not LinkedIn), Nimble will search the other network(s) for their ID and suggest possible matches. However, at present, you need to set up the import periodically, to include new contacts you’ve made. Nimble says that eventually it will automatically check for new contacts on your social networks.

Having a form on your Website is good for business, making it easy for people to contact you, and keep you informed about what they need or want from you. Wufoo.com (various pricing, with plans from free to $200/month) makes the difficult, cumbersome task of designing and managing a form less intimidating.

Wufoo’s tabbed interface appears simple, but has lots of options for customizing your Web form.Wufoo's tabbed interface is rather simple to navigate. However, the site is not as intuitive as the simple interface implies, making it necessary to fully read the excellent, detailed online documentation.

For over a century and a half, folks searching for just the right synonym to express an idea would reach for a thesaurus, which is essentially a well-indexed book containing lists of related words. The problem has always been (and continues even with today’s popular Web-based versions) that it’s all too easy to use the wrong word in the list. For instance, suppose you were writing the sentence, “The child touched the dog.” Looking up “touch” in a traditional thesaurus, the list of synonyms would include “abut,” “tag,” “kiss,” “verge,” “hint,” etc. In other words, with no guidance or understanding of the nuances involved, many people have ended up looking quite silly or even saying the direct opposite of what they meant. Subscription-based Web tool Visual Thesaurus ($3/month or $20/year) sweeps away these problems.

The Visual Thesaurus's dynamic graphical interface shows relationships among words. It changes when you click on a word, and provides popup definitions and usage examples.Visual Thesaurus has a dynamic and intuitive graphical interface that is useful, playful and educational. Search on a word, and the display that pops up in the center of the screen makes it quite clear how the words relate to each other. Closely related words are grouped. Solid lines indicate a direct relationship, while a dotted line means that the central word is a type of the other. For example, “contact” is a direct synonym of “touch.” However, as a popup balloon explains when you hover your mouse over the dotted line, “touch” is a type of “solicitation.”

When we reviewed the previous version of Ashampoo's Photo Optimizer, our tests showed that it was a decent though not stellar product. Its greatest weakness was a lack of image editing tools and special effects. With the new version 4.0, Ashampoo Photo Optimizer's feature set has been expanded, making it more fun and more useful.

Photo Optimizer now has more image edit tools and special effects, plus split screen options to view before/after versions of your picture.The new version of Ashampoo Photo Optimizer ($15, ten-day free trial) has basically the same highly accessible interface. To the right is Windows Explorer-like tree, displaying all the drives and folders connected to your computer and your network. When you click on a folder that has JPEG photos in it, those are displayed as scalable thumbnails at the top of the screen. While Photo Optimizer still imports only JPEGs, it can now save to JPEG, BMP, PNG, TGA or TIFF. Another useful addition are the various split screen options to view before and after images - horizontal, vertical or diagonal. However, the split screen is available only after an effect has been applied, and not while you are making your editing decisions.

Note: This review addresses v0.7.110 of the software.

All your computers and smart devices keep you connected and productive--until the file you need is on your work computer, and you're in an airport with a netbook. Enter Dropbox, which keeps your files accessible and synced from all your various devices.

Sometimes, all you want to do is have a bit of fun with your photos. Lo-Fi ($29, seven-day free trial) is a very easy-to-use, uncomplicated program that gives your photos a different mood or color, or adds a neat frame, with the push of a button.

Lo-Fi is a very basic, fun-to-use program for adding film-like effects to your digital photographs.Lo-Fi has a cute interface, in the shape of the back of a camera. If you want, you can move through the program in three steps: (1) load your JPEG pictures, by clicking on the + button; (2) apply random photo effects; (3) save your JPEG picture or share it on flickr or Facebook.

Sometimes, all you want to do is have a bit of fun with your photos. Lo-Fi is a very easy-to-use, uncomplicated program that gives your photos a different mood or color, or adds a neat frame, with the push of a button.

Lo-Fi has a cute interface, in the shape of the back of a camera. If you want, you can move through the program in three steps: (1) load your JPEG pictures, by clicking on the + button; (2) apply random photo effects; (3) save your JPEG picture or share it on flickr or Facebook.

Windows Live Photo Gallery offers a nice array of consumer-level tools for photo organizing, editing, and sharing.

On startup, your photos automatically display in Windows Live Photo Gallery's Organizer. With the click of a button, you can sort them by Date, Rating, Person, Geotag, Tag, Name, Folder, or Published (uploaded to the Web). Adding Tags, Names, and Ratings couldn't be easier. Simply open the Tag and Caption pane (which displays to the right the screen) then select the photo or group of photos, and type in the relevant information into the appropriate field for that tag or select it from a list. To rate a picture(s), click on a star (1 to 5). As you identify photos as containing a certain person, Photo Gallery learns that person's face, and will attempt to recognize it in future pictures. We found the program's face recognition engine works rather well and learns very quickly. For instance, after we identified actor Eli Wallach in only two pictures, Photo Gallery offered his name in the People tag field for every other photo we had of him. Importing photos from a camera, memory card, or other external source is similarly simple.

Click on a Perfect Preset to quickly change Lightroom Develop module’s settings and to learn more about how they affect your photo.For professional photographers and serious hobbyists, Adobe Lightroom is key to their image editing workflow. They use it to sort, organize, develop, and publish photos, often as a preliminary to working on their pictures in Photoshop. However, Lightroom's image editing module, Develop, has become so powerful and versatile that for many photographers it is replacing Photoshop for basic editing. What makes Lightroom so valuable is that once you have mastered the program and defined frequently used custom settings (presets), you can move quickly from upload of the pictures to your computer to actually using them. OnOne Software's Perfect Presets for Lightroom has over 190 predefined presets that can speed up your workflow, while providing guidance to help you more quickly master the Develop module.

Perfect Presets is organized intelligently, according to the way most photographers work. For instance, the presets start with optimizing tools, with White Balance listed first, followed by tone curve settings, on through to color and tone settings and ending with special effects, such as tinting, split-toning, or vignettes.

You could spend hundreds of dollars on image-editing software. But before you part with your hard-earned money, consider one of these free photo-editing programs. No matter what your level of expertise, one of these eight photo editors will fit your needs and personality--as well as your budget.

(For access to all of these downloads in one convenient place, see our "Photo Editors for Everyone" collection.)

Almost as easy to use as its name implies, the Kodak EasyShare software (free) provides consumer-level tools for organizing, sorting, editing, and using your photos in a variety of ways. Though it is designed specifically to work with Kodak cameras and printers (and is supplied with most Kodak hardware), anyone can download it at no cost and use it with any camera or printer.

Adding keyword tags to your photos in Kodak EasyShare software is as simple as selecting your photo(s) and checking off all the tags that apply.