Chances are, your movie collection probably isn’t the greenest thing in your home. Luckily, it’s easier than ever to turn those stacks of DVD’s into digital copies that burn less energy, take up less space, and work just as easily on your TV’s as they do on your iPod or iPhone.

If you’re an iTunes fan, you’ve no doubt noticed that they started selling movies a while back. Their collection is surprisingly strong and with the recently added “Rental” feature, there’s little reason not to take advantage of the enormous library at your fingertips for somewhere between $.99 and $3.99. Of course, the option to buy your favorite titles is still on the table with most movies selling for between $9.99 and $14.99, depending on their release dates. If you happen to have an AppleTV, you can even take advantage of higher quality HD video at a fraction of the cost of any of today’s Blu-Ray players and titles.

Buying and downloading your movies saves a lot of energy, a lot of gas, and (usually) at least a little bit of money. Of course, you’ll still need to take the occasional trip to the theater to see the newest titles (at least to do it legally), but grabbing most of what’s already out on DVD is even easier than finding it in stores.

Even if iTunes isn’t your thing, its competitors have been quick to launch their own similar services with Netflix’s new On-Demand feature quickly shaping up to be a worthy alternative. With over 12,000 titles available in unlimited amounts to all of its subscribers, their service is a little different from iTunes’ buy-and-rent system, but very useful all the same.

Online services are great starting points for making greener choices when it comes to adding new movies to your library but, with the help of some simple software, you can green-up your existing titles too.

Since most of this blog’s readers are visiting from Macs, I’ll go through an easy Mac way to transform your DVD’s into iTunes friendly video files that can easily be played on everything from an AppleTV to an iPod or even your computer itself.

The easiest way to do this is to use a free program like HandBrake, which extracts the DVD to your hard-drive and then converts it into an iTunes friendly format. DVD’s can take up quite a bit of space, so make sure that you have at least four to five gigabytes of free space before you begin. You’ll delete the files later, so they won’t be there for long, but it’s good to have some room to work with.

HandBrake has a number of options, but you’ll probably want to stick to mostly default settings if you’re not overly tech-savvy. The software does offer a number of features and options, however, that can prove useful if you’re converting a lot of movies or notice small differences in visual or audio quality.

If you’d like to convert already-digital copies of movies stored on your hard-drive into an iTunes friendly format, you’ll need to use a different tool. iSquint is a great way to get started, but if you’re looking for more options you may want to look into more feature-friendly apps like VisualHub. As with HandBrake, most of the settings are pretty straightforward, but feel free to dive into the applications’ manuals to play with more advanced settings that control quality and size.

Your iTunes Music Library is probably a bit of a mess. Mine was for several years before I finally sat down and began organizing the 20,000 or so tracks that made up my collection at the time; I’m now closer to 250. But, no matter how large or small your library may be, there are a few tricks you can use to make finding, hearing, and listening to songs better than ever.

First, I’ll show you how to assign genres to your music and develop a series of “Live-Updating” Smart Playlists that correspond to whatever genres you happen to have.

The first step is simply assigning genres to all of your music. If your library numbers in the thousands, this task can be time-consuming, to say the least, but you can make use of keyboard shortcuts to make your work slightly easier. By holding down the Command key on a Mac or the Shift key on a PC, you can select multiple songs, say from the same artist, and ‘tag’ them all with the same genre.

After selecting your song or songs, right click them and select “Get Info” from the pop-up menu. Now, simply look for the “Genre” box and check the box next to it.

You can assign your song or group of songs a single genre, or use multiple genres by separating each one as I’ve done in the screenshot above. If your songs fall into a number of different possible genres, it’s probably a good idea to tag them with multiple genres - you’ll see why in our next step.

After you’ve finished tagging all of your music with genres, hold down the Option key on a Mac or the Alt key on a PC and click the gear icon in the bottom left corner of iTunes. This will bring up the “Smart Playlist” window.

Change the drop-down box on the left to “Genre” and then type in a genre that you’d like to create a playlist for - in the screenshot above, I’ve selected “Pop.” This will automatically create a Smart Playlist that contains every song that has Pop as at least one of its genres. If I add a new song to my library and tag it as Pop, it will also automatically be added to the playlist.

You can also specify multiple genres that you’d like added to your playlist. There is a box at the top of the Smart Playlist window that allows you to select the option to match “all” or “any” of the rules you create. Selecting “all” will add only songs that adhere to all of the options you choose to enter, while selecting “any” will add songs that fit any one of the options that you enter. For example, in the screenshot above, I’ve selected “all,” clicked the circle with a plus button, and entered both Pop and Rock. Only songs with at least “Pop, Rock” in the genre box will be added to my playlist. If I were to select “any” instead, songs with either Pop or Rock would be added to my playlist.

You can mix and match genre playlists to personalize your library. I, for instance, have a Summer playlist that automatically grabs the songs that I’ve classified as “Acoustic” and “Reggae.” Feel free to play around to give your playlists your own personal touch.

Now that you know a little bit about Smart Playlists, we can take the idea one step further by utilizing the Star-Rating system in iTunes. By rating all of your songs, you can set up another set of Smart Playlists that adhere to one, two, three, four, or five star songs. The process is exactly the same as the one above, only this time instead of selecting “Genre” you will select “Rating.”

Finally, you’ll want to give your music library a face-lift by adding cover art for each of your albums. If you’ve purchased all of your music from the iTunes Music Store, this won’t be necessary. If you haven’t, however, this will give your library the appearance of iTunes-bought music without the DRM, credit card, or iTunes account required to achieve the same effects otherwise.

We’ll start by going to the menu bar at the top of the screen, selecting “Advanced,” and then “Get Album Artwork.” Depending on how much music you have, this process can take a while. Once completed, you should have most of your artwork filled in for albums that iTunes was able to compare with its music store.

If some of your albums still show up without cover art, click the arrow icon next to the artist’s name and search for the corresponding album in the iTunes Music Store. If you can find it, make sure that your version on your computer has the same artist and album information as the one on the iTunes Store and try to get the artwork again by clicking on your songs or album and selecting “Get Album Artwork.”

Occasionally, your album’s artwork won’t be available on iTunes; in which case, you’ll need to resort to Amazon or Google Images. Fetch Art For iTunes integrates with iTunes to retrieve missing album art from Amazon. Read the instructions on the linked page for information on how to install and make use of the script.

Whether your photo’s final destination is Facebook or Forbes, making it “pop” can go a long way in grabbing your audience’s attention. For this tutorial, we’ll be using a simple variety of tools and settings nestled within the many menus of our friend Photoshop.

To get a quick idea of what we’ll be doing, I’ve attached a quick before and after preview:

There are a few different techniques you can use to give your photo the look we’re going for - I’ll go through a few of them in succession.

First, we’ll start by simply duplicating our image. Right click your image in the Layers toolbar and select “Duplicate Layer.”

Next, we’re going to set the duplicate image to “Overlay” to bring out its strongest features. 

Most of the time, your image will appear in an extreme state after this little procedure so be sure to adjust your Opacity of the duplicated image accordingly. In this case, I’ll change it to 30% to bring out some of the tones in the image without making it too dark.

When you’re through adjusting your duplicated image, select the original image again in the Layers toolbar. If you haven’t renamed your layers, your duplicate should be called something like “Layer 1 Copy” while your original image should be called “Layer 1.” After selecting your original image, click on “Image” in the menu bar at the top of your screen. Select “Adjustments” and then “Levels.” (Or, simply press Command-L if you’re a shortcut savvy Mac user)

Every image will need its levels tweaked differently. For this image, I’ve adjusted the left arrow to 12, the middle arrow to 1.44 and the right arrow to 222. The differences in the image are subtle here, but you can achieve more or less extreme effects on your image by tweaking these settings a bit further.

With your original image still selected (”Layer 1″), select “Image” in the menu bar at the top of your screen followed by “Adjustments” and then “Shadow/Highlight.”

I’ve adjusted Shadows to 70% and Highlights to 10%, but once again feel free to play around with your settings since every image is different.

You’re almost done. Make sure your original image (”Layer 1″) is still selected. Then, click on “Image” in the menu bar at the top of your screen followed by “Adjustments” and then “Curves” (Command-M).

As with our other settings, you’ll need to play with your image’s curve to achieve your desired effect. In this case, I’ve set my Input to 110 and my Output to 155. Curves is slightly more sensitive than the other tools we’ve used thus far, so minor changes in either direction can be all you need to bump your image up to perfection.

Congratulations! You’re image has been “Popped.” I’d upload the files so you could carry out the tutorial yourself, but it’s easier to simply link to the image I used. The photo, “Arriving Late At House” by Mario Magallanes is available here.