The Mill is an award-winning visual effects studio with offices in London and New York. It should go without saying that these guys know a thing or two about color. What's surprising, though, is that they're giving away a small chunk of that expertise for absolutely free in the form of an iPhone app. Mill Colour [iTunes link] can customize the colors of your photos using a bunch of tried-and-true preset effects, and it also has powerful manual color controls.

Even if you don't go beyond the prepackaged effects in Mill Colour, it's well worth checking out. I recommend the "bleached" and "noir" looks, especially. If you start to mess around with the manual side of Mill Colour, though, you'll quickly discover how powerful it is. You can fine-tune the saturation, gamma, gain and lift of each individual RGB channel, making sure your image looks precisely the way you want it to. Did I mention it's a free download?

Tilt-shift photography, if you haven't heard of it, is a technique that results in only one small area of a photo being in focus. This tight area of focus often results in the photo appearing to be made up of miniatures, rather than real people and objects. The effect typically requires a special (and often expensive) tilt-shift optical lens. If you don't have the money for the real thing, or just want to play with the effect, check out Tiltshift Generator.

The Tiltshift Generator website hosts a Flash application that will allow you to open any image that is local on your file system, then apply effects that will approximate the tilt-shift effect. The default settings out of the gate are quite good, but if you're not happy with the results there are a number of tweaks you can make to get just the effect you're looking for. You can also apply the effect to portraits, to really focus in on the subject matter. While not a traditional use of a tilt-shift camera, the effect when using Tiltshift Generator on this type of photo is quite nice.

In addition to being a website, Tiltshift Generator is available as an Adobe AIR free cross-platform application, so you can take your tilt-shifting offline.

If you're no Photoshop guru, but you have fun applying different novelty filters to your pictures, you might like Dumpr. It's web-based, very simple to use, and has a pretty decent library of effects: sketch, Lomo, reflection and jigsaw puzzle, to name a few. You can upload photos from your own hard drive, or paste in URLs from some of the major photo hosting services, including Flickr and MySpace.

Dumpr isn't really meant for advanced users, although buying a Pro account will get you access to a few more effects. Despite the ... interesting ... choice of name, Dumpr is pretty fun to play with, and it's great for quickly doing things to photos that would take a while for a novice to learn in Photoshop. It also has a few Flickr-specific features, like searching for pictures similar to your favorites, and rating Flickr photos. We're still not sure about telling our friends we're going to Dumpr some photos of them, though.

Sure, Flickr is a great place to find and share images. But wouldn't it be nice if you could also edit those images online? Now you can. OK, you've been able to for a long time, using online photo editing sites like Picnik and SnipShot. But now Flickr and Picnik have added an "edit photo" button to that makes the process pretty darn easy.

We first heard that Flickr was partnering with Picnik back in October. At the time, we half suspected that all you'd see is an "edit with Picnik" button on each photo that would let you load up an image on Picnik's site. But the service that launched today is far cooler than that. You can access Picnik's powerful photo imaging interface without leaving Flickr at all.

That means you can crop, resize, adjust exposure, contract, color saturation and other aspects of your images with just a few clicks. You can also apply effects like converting color images to black and white. if you have a Picnik Premium account, you can access some additional effects like Infrared, Night Vision, Tint, and Invert.

In order to edit a photo, you'll need to login to your account and select an image you've uploaded. You'll should see an "edit photo" button in the toolbar above your picture. For now it doesn't look like there's any way to edit images uploaded by other users.

You can say what you want about the use or need for screensavers in today's computing world - but it won't effect the cool factor of these iSight Screensavers. Designed for Macs with iSight cameras (either built-in or otherwise), iSight Screensavers provides six different effects that can interact with video shot by an iSight, making for one cool screensaver. Effects like Fluid, Particles, Fire and Water are all sure to be a hit around the office and household, especially if your Mac is anywhere near a decent flow of traffic.

Check out the video for a full demo of what iSight Screensavers is capable of (note that some effects require dedicated graphics cards) or download a demo for yourself. A license costs a mere $10.

Script.aculo.us is an amazing framework for enriching your website's user experience very easily. Built on top of the very popular prototype javascript framework, scriptaculous makes AJAX cake, and gives everyone the power to have a sexy AJAX-powered website, yes everyone. Scriptaculous is a tiny (140kb) javascript framework that gives you the power of effects, several dynamic data components, and all you need to know is a little bit about HTML and how to read. If you already have your own website, it is not hard to do. Follow these steps to AJAX up your site in no time:

1. Download script.aculo.us. Click on any of these links to begin downloading the zip, tar.gz, or tar.bz2 version.
   
   
2. Unzip the archive somewhere, preferably somewhere you will find it again. This is key.
   
   
3. Upload the whole thing to your web server, and put it where ever you like, again, it should be somewhere you can find it. Once again, finding it is key. You will need to link to these files from your web page, so putting the files in a sub folder of your home directory (root for you unix junkies) is a good idea.
   
   
4. In the header section of your web pages, you need to put this code:
   

   <script src="ajax/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
   <script src="ajax/scriptaculous.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

   As you might notice, the code has to point to your uploaded script.aculo.us files. You would replace the "ajax/" portion with your own path depending on the name of your subfolder.
   
   
5. Next, put the one line of code into your pages or posts where ever you want the effect to take place. Let's say you have a content div element you want to have all the sudden appear in the page, all you do is wire the "SlideDown" effect (one of many in script.aculo.us, download the cheat sheet here) to a button, link, or other clickable element on your page. The code to trigger the SlideDown effect from a link looks like this:
   
   <a href="#" onclick="Effect.SlideDown('content');">SlideDown Now!</a>
   
   Why use an <a> tag? First, it is super simple to code (everyone knows it), and second, users think it is an ordinary link. They will be quite surprised when they find out it isn't normal at all. I call this "hacking old-skool users into using web 2.0 unknowingly" (or something like that).
   
   
6. Anyway...be sure your div tag has the id="content" because that is the name of the element the SlideDown effect will be applied to once you click the "link" we just made. Make sense? Good. NOTE: Something to remember is that your DIV will be shown on the page automatically by default, unless you first hide it, so the visual magic of an effect such as SlideDown can really be displayed. To "hide" our div by default so your content won't appear until you click the link we just made, you will need to add an inline CSS style (or add one in your CSS file, if you have one) so the content div ends up looking like this:
   

   <div id="content" style="display: none;">This is the content.</div>

   You'll notice (I hope) that the underlined code is the part that hides this div by default. When the SlideDown effect is triggered by clicking on the <a> link, it will automatically change the div's display property, so don't worry about having to do that.
   
7. Try it out, and have fun! It should slide down your content, which can be anything you put in that div tag, video, audio, pictures, more javascript, an iframe, whatever, use your imagination. There are tons of different effects you can use, so you should check them out at script.aculo.us's website, since they have great demos and even combination demos for different sets of effects.
   
   Since the script.aculo.us wiki is large and contains a lot of information to consume all at once, I have compiled a basic script.aculo.us effects cheat sheet of sorts for your quick and dirty coding enjoyment. You can download my PDF cheat sheet here.

Have fun AJAXing your site, and once you're done, come back and give us a link to your site so we can see what you've done with the place. I'd love to check out your site with the framework in action. It can do some wicked cool stuff. You can build entire sites out of script.aculo.us including AJAX drop-downs, AJAX page loading, and custom stuff. Let me know how your site turns out with it.

NOTE (to lightbox and TinyMCE users): There are some special instructions on integrating script.aculo.us with both of these other frameworks, since they all use Prototype to some extent. You can find TinyMCE help here (script.aculo.us wiki) and most lightbox frameworks list this info on their support page or forums section of the site. Have fun!

Apple started a trend with FrontRow by introducing the suave effect called wet floor. Everyone and their dog are using on their website now, but so what? It is cool. Siuyee Presents a free plugin for WordPress that allows you to use the wet floor effect on images. The only downside to this neat plugin is that it can't be used in the rich editing mode, only in plain editor mode. Of course the easier way to avoid this is to just use a bit of simple code to "wet-floor" any image. The plugin even offers customized height and opacity. This example code is all you need: <img class="reflect rheight80 ropacity40" src="abc.jpg" /> I know from experience that this code works in both posts and in theme template files, so you can easily "wet-floor" your banner or footer image as well as little Susie's picture in your post. I know there are a ton of similar scripts out there, but I found this one particularly useful and easy. Who knew eye-candy was so simple?