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Steganography is a technology used to hide text documents in photos. To the human eye, the photo appears as a simple image but, in fact, the snapshot may be giving new meaning to the old saw that a picture is worth a thousand words.

If you're intrigued with the idea of burying secret text in your photos, a program released this week, QuickCrypto, may be worth trying.

The Windows software is a general purpose encryption application, but in includes among its many features a steganography function. The function allows you to hide plain text or encrypted files in photos. Those files can only be viewed by someone with a copy of QuickCrypto and knowledge of a password needed to unlock them.

One agreeable feature of QuickCrypto is it permits you to encrypt individual files on your hard disk. Some programs allow that to be done only to entire folders.

The software also has a password vault where passwords can be encrypted and hidden from prying hackers and a password generator for creating hard-to-break passwords.

Other features include a file shredding utility that meets U.S. Department of Defense standards and support of AES and Blowfish encryption methods.

QuickCrypto Professional costs $39.95. There's also a home edition offered at $14.95. A 15-day free trial version is available for download from the software writer's Web site.

When we first heard about MyLite from a company named DoApp, we thought: "Oh great. Just what the world needs. Software to turn a $200 piece of high tech hardware into a flashlight." Then we began to the learn about the limitations of our imagination. It seems that some photographers have taken the free application for the iPhone and iPod Touch and used it to create some interesting artistic experiments like these lotus pod and light drawing effects. MyLite can also turn the i-gadgets into a flat panel light useful for brightening up low light close-ups.

Serif, which is known for making decent software and selling it for a decent price, has released a new version of its digital imaging product. Digital Photo Suite 2009 ($49.99) includes tools for organizing, editing and sharing photos.

DPS 2009 seems to be a "catch-up" release, adding features that have become standard fare in pricier software in this category. For instance, new features in the application's organizational module include restoring photos that have been edited to their original state, "watching" specific folders for new image additions then automatically adding those new images to specific albums and viewing photos in their native folders with a Folder View.

New features in the editing module are also old hat for other editors. There's a portrait makeover feature, for example, to remove blemishes, smooth wrinkles and brighten teeth. Instant Artwork allows an imagesmith to apply artistic effects--watercolor, comic book and such--to a photo. And now the software allows photos to be rotated without a loss of quality and be stitched into panoramas.

The sharing module has the most interesting new additions to the software. It has a YouTube upload, for sending slideshows to that video sharing service, as well as direct upload to Flickr and Facebook. It also allows slideshows created in the application to be exported as Flash animations and it lets customizable animated menus to be added to those slideshows.

While many of DPS 2009's new features may seem like leftovers to connaisseurs of more expensive programs, photographers looking for a photo suite that's fat on features and lean on price will find Serif's offering a sweet confection.

Contrast control over a digital photo is a powerful tool. If you don't believe that, take a gander at ContrastMaster. The plug-in, which works in a variety of image editors--such as Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop Elements, and others--and platforms--both PCs and Macintoshes--gives imagesmiths amazing control over the details in a photo, and with that control, the ability to create some eye-popping pictures. It's even possible, according to the program's authors, to produce High Dynamic Range effects without the HDR overhead. The application is designed with six skill levels to accommodate a gamut of knowledge from novice to professional. The program costs $69.95, but demo versions of the software for both Windows and OS X can be downloaded from the Plugin Site.

While programs like Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop X2 are necessities for fine tuning digital images, for some purposes they can be overkill. Sometimes an imagesmith just needs to make some basic adjustments to a photo without launching a dreadnaught application. That's the idea behind WinJPG released this week by Lithuania-based T Studio. Written only for Windows, the program can be called up in the right-click context menu and give a photojack tools for enhancing color in an image, sharpening it, resizing it and watermarking it. Changes can be confined to one image or applied to many. WinJPG is priced at $49.95 but a fully-functional trial version can be downloaded from T Studio's Web site.

Many of us are accustomed to giving voice commmands to our cameras--especially when we get annoyed with them. What we're not accustomed to is our cameras obeying our commands. For many bytecam owners, that prospect may not be immediate, but not so for owners of Canon EOS digital cameras. Software meister Scott Foreman has written an application called ShutterVoice that works with Canon's desktop software to control camera models like the 20D, 30D, 50D and XSi with voice commands from a computer (see video above). The software, expected to be ready for prime time later this month, is Windows-only and will cost $30.

It seems these days good words bestowed on Microsoft are few and far between. Some of the company's woes have been fostered by competitors like Apple and others by expensive but dubious marketing campaigns to mask the profound problems with its Vista operating system. One area where the Redmond crew has done some praiseworthy work is in image stitching. Its 3D slideshow program Photosynth is a technological tour de force and, in a smaller way, so is its AutoCollage application.

Another image software product offered by Microsoft is Composite Editor, a free application for stitching together a series of photos to form a panorama. A new version of that program was announced by the company this week. The release addresses a number of bugs in the prior edition of the program. And, as you may have noticed in the above panorama created with the software, more tweaking may be necessary. Nevertheless Composite Editor is worth downloading and experimenting with. Its intelligence in matching sequential images is bound to impress.

If you pine for the days of instant prints with unlifelike colors, then Poladroid may curb your yearning. The free Macintosh application takes perfectly good image files and turns them into facsimiles of prints from a Polaroid instant camera.

When you run Poladroid, a graphic of a Polaroid camera appears on the Mac desktop. You simply drag an image file to the camera, wait for that old familar sound of a print being pushed out of the snapper and watch the photo develop, very slowly, before your eyes. Yes, just like the real thing, it takes from two to three minutes for the image to appear, although you can hurry the process a bit by grabbing the photo and "shaking" it.

Admittedly, my experience with the program produced photos more lifelike than I remember Polaroids being. However, the fingerprints randomly placed on pictures produced with Poladroid were an authentic touch.

While iMovie, the video editing program packaged with Macintosh computers, can be used to create slideshows from digital photos, it has its limitations. Some critics might even say those limitations were compounded when Apple redesigned the application from scratch for its last release, iMovie '08. That's why photographers looking for a more robust approach to creating slideshows are turning to programs like FotoMagico, by Boinx Software, of Munich.

Boinx announced today a new edition of the Mac-only software, version 2.6, which adds support for Adobe Lightroom 2 libraries and includes a plug-in for Apple's photographic workflow application Aperture. The new additions allow FotoMagico to directly snatch images from the Adobe and Apple programs for use in slideshows. In addition, pictures can be exported directly from inside Aperture into the Boinx software.

What's more, by using the iMedia browser, music and sound from other Apple apps--GarageBand, iLife and iTunes--as well as media folders can be dragged into FotoMagico and used in a slideshow's soundtrack. Imports from iTunes, though, are limited to non-protected songs, unless the music is being used in a "live" slideshow.

Other features in the Boinx software remain the same like support for RAW images; pan and zoom effects for both photos and titles; numerous transitons like dissolve, cube and thumb through; non-destructive color editing; setting the in and out points for music tracks; and presets for tailoring a project to run on devices like the iPod and iPhone.

Existing users can upgrade to version 2.6 for free. New users can chose between a lite editon called Express ($49) and the Pro variant ($129), which includes HD support. A free five-day trial offering can also be downloaded from the Boinx Web site.

If digital photography has fostered anything, it's sharing. Shutterbugs are exchanging photos through e-mail, posting images on the Web at numerous photo sharing sites, carrying snaps around on media players and trading pics on their mobile phones. One snag in the fluidity of these exchanges is the absence of a lingua franca among devices. What's suitable for one device may be persona non grata on another. That's why a program like Nero's Move It ($49.99 box, $39.99 download) can be an answer to a sharer's prayers.

Nero announced Move It today, along with version 9 of its media suite and a package integrated with TiVo called Liquid TV.

Move It can be used as a collection point on your PC for your photos and other media. When you want to move a file to a device, just plug it into your computer and the software will recognize it and make it digestible for the target.

"It lets you move any of the digital content of your life--no matter where it sits--and move it to other devices or otther online storage spaces," Nero President Richard Carriere told Megapixel.net.

"It takes all the power of the engines that Nero has developed over the years for transcoding, copying, et cetera," he continued, "together with a database that's now up to 200 devices and allows you to move content around very easily without you having to make any technology decisions."

Carriere is not only president of Nero, but a beta tester, too. "When I installed the first beta of this product on my PC," he recalled, "I went to the installation wizard, plugged in my iPod and my phone, and in one click, it copied 8000 songs to my phone. It took an hour and half to do it, but it was done."

The songs, by the way, were tunes ripped from CDs. The software won't copy protected content between devices.

A nice feature of the application is that it will adjust the quality of the media to accommodate the device it's sent to. "By default, it will take and transfer the media at the best quality for the device," Nero OEM Support Manager David Yang told Megapixel.net. However, those defaults can be altered so more photos, songs and such can be downloaded to the device.

With sharing options becoming more prolific and complex every day, Move It is bound to quickly become an essential addition to many a sharer's software library.