In the past photographers were rare professionals and had to be very skilled in order to be able to get nice photos all the time, without using all the gestures that are available today and give you the opportunity to operate a lot of changes on the original image. Photos were treasured as very valuable memories and most of them turned into portraits hung on the walls. Because for this the original photo had to be enlarged, some of the photographers made some adjustments with the help of a black pencil, drawing some eye lashes and contour of the nose or some shadow around the eyes. This is laughable now, but those were the times then. Now, since the digital camera began being used on a large scale everybody can make their own photos and even edit them or crop the, resize them or even use some photo montage software for more sophisticated effects.
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You can use this software to crop, cut, resize and do all the changes that you regularly do with a normal photo editing software. But photo montage software offers you some more: you can now accomplish more interesting projects like making a kind of collage of your child, as you can see in the picture above, where you take more photos and paste and adjust them together to create the impression they are a single image. This is very interesting and looks very well at the same time. You can make a poster or a big framed photo of your kid showing him or her in different positions and moods but one and the same in the end.


The most remarkable feature of the photo montage software is, no doubt , the possibility to actually get a "photo montage". Let me describe this in a few words for the ones who are not familiar with this. Some crazy or maybe genial photographer whose name I don't know had the brilliant idea to make one huge photo he displayed in an art gallery and that showed a beautiful woman. In fact this huge photo was a big collage of thousands of photos that were cropped and put together with a lot of meticulousness and skill, chosen very carefully to have exactly the needed shade and shape that would fit the big background.

That's exactly what this software does now automatically in a matter of minutes, instead of letting you work hard for two months. All you have to do is purchase the software, install it on your computer and choose the picture that you want to edit. By the way, all these photo montage software are very easy to install and they usually provide you with a wide collection of photos, in case you do not have as many as you should for finishing your project. The result will be a new version of the image you selected, but this time made up of little bits of hundreds of other photos that will confer a mosaic aspect .


Here is a list with some very popular photo montage software that you can find on the internet: some photo mosaic softwares, ArcSoft PhotoMontage 2000, Image Elements PhotoMontage (free download), other examples of photo montage software, IE PhotoMontage 1.9.

The person who has the idea and designs a software is considered its author and hence he or she has copyrights on it. Even if the software is copied and distributed all over the world, when you buy it , you actually buy the license to use that software for your personal purpose. Purchasing it does not mean that you now own it and so you can do whatever you want with it. You can only copy it a few times for backup purposes. But you cannot copy it in order to offer it to someone else or , even worse, with the purpose of selling it and obtaining some material advantages from it. In fact unauthorized copy and distribution of such software is totally forbidden and is called software piracy.
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If you are curious and consult statistics you will see that a very big percentage of the software used around the world is not genuine, but pirated. I don't need to tell you what are the economic and financial implications of software piracy both for the software producers, but also for the economy of the states where this software is used without a license, as you can figure this out by yourselves. If the software is illegally copied and distributed that goes to the development of the underground trade and that particular country loses a lot of money it would have got otherwise from the legitimate selling of the software. The company producing the software loses the acquisition price for every single item sold on the black market. And because software companies need money to invest in research and the development of future improved software, the lack of funds leads to stagnation or a slow development. So, as you can see, everyone is affected by software piracy, even the people selling the pirated software. They can be traced and found and arrested in the countries where the state respects the copyright law and after that severely punished.



The users of such software without a license can suffer the consequences because very often the software they purchase infests their computers with all kinds of trojans and other computer viruses that can cause serious damage to their computers.

However, Microsoft officials were really funny when they said that if they can't stop software piracy they would prefer people to steal their software instead of the competitors, hoping that one day they will become so addicted or accustomed with it as to purchase a licensed one. Another funny but actually very serious statement belongs to the president of Romania who said that young people from this country learnt how to use a computer and after that turned into valuable computer specialists due to this pirated versions of software, as they were unable to purchase any other kind of software. The incredible thing about this is the fact that the computer industry and sales in such countries developed a lot and are now blooming thanks to software piracy.



In fact this software piracy appeared and resisted mainly in such countries without a precise legislation in this field, for example countries from the Eastern European block that were very tormented after gaining their independence from the Comunism and it took them a while to set up a proper legislation. Other examples are the countries in the Far East like China and Hong Kong and the African countries, too.

Well, in the meantime things have changed a bit and more and more countries respect the copyright law and let's hope in the near future things will get even better than this.

Audacity software is one of the most popular and free or open source audio editing software. Its popularity relies mainly on the fact that you can download it for free from the specialized web sites and also to the fact that it is very easy to use, at the same time offering enough features to satisfy all the requirements of the average user.

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Of course, because it is free it does not have all the complex featured of the most expensive audio editing software, but it offers enough opportunities for amateurs and even starting bands or singers who can't afford any sophisticated and expensive equipment. Audacity software has all the basic features of a digital audio workstation and also some advanced ones, like adding special sound effects (echo, adding the sound of a guitar, etc).



This audio editor and recorder is compatible with a wide range of operating systems, among which: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and others. Ar first sight you have the impression that this software is just too simple to be also efficient in some way. In fact it is rather complex and a very useful tool when you want to edit or record sounds. You can use it for mixing music, too, but I must warn you it is not that good at this. So you's better use it for the parts where this software is very good, that is editing audio files. There are a lot of editing tools available that can help you obtain just the desired shape and effect of the sound.

The most important tool is the selector, the one that allows you to select what kind of audio you want to work with. After selecting the audio file you want to edit you simply press shift+spacebar to play it in a loop and add all kinds of effects until you get the desired result. Other tools are: the envelope tool, the draw tool, the zoom tool, time shift and a multi-tool mode. You can perform all the simple operations that you need in editing an audio file, like copy, paste, trim, cut.

Another useful tool is the undo history, because accidents happen and you may delete something that proves important or make an uninspired move and you will want to return to the previous stage of the file. However, this history is gone when you save the changes made so far, so you's better think twice before you do that.



Audacity software brings very easy to use and useful tools that definitely help you edit audio files and you can even obtain very good results if you know how to make use of them properly. Besides, this software also allows you to record sound on your computer, coming from whatever source: microphone, in-line or whatever audio file you are listening to on your computer, even if you listen to an internet radio or play an old vinyl record and import the sound on your sound card . This software can work like a sound converter then and turn the music from your old LP disk into WAV or MP3 file. Pretty cool, right? And all these and a lot more, free of charge, ready to be downloaded here.