Blog, Branding, Content & Copywriting, Marketing, Product Reviews
We all know that blogs have practically taken the place of television now-yes even “reality” TV is green with envy. Every moment of every day someone is blogging. It’s actually estimated that currently there are “about 450 million active English language blogs right now from when Technorati estimated over 200 million blogs at the start of 2009. That’s some exponential growth and these numbers change every day as new blogs are started by the thousands (or tens of thousands) every day.”
So that’s a lot of people opining on every topic/issue and many, with a sharp business acumen and talented tapping tips (fingertips that is & suggestive ones too) that we can all learn or gleen from. So today I pay homage to my fellow bloggers and thought you’d enjoy some of my picks for sound advice from some trendy and noteworthy fellow bloggers who I follow and are part of my Go-To sourcebook for information and inspiration.
All Posts, Photography, Product Reviews
We received an email from our friends at Wallpaper Wizard for a special deal on a new Mac OSX app called Photo+ from ArcSoft. If you do photography like we do, chances are you have quite a few applications that all do certain things very well. If on a Mac, you’re probably used to using the default Preview app. While great for single images, viewing multiple images in full, zooming, cropping, and such are a bit cumbersome and limited. With Photo+ however there are a host of great features to make showcasing a whole folder of images really easy and fast to display.
Using your track pad or Magic Mouse you can easily slide left and right or hover over images to view them. Full images within large folders open quickly. As you can see you have plenty of controls to use to:
- Easily start a slideshow
- Navigate images
- Delete images
- Share to social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr
- Make photos favorites
- Zoom
- And my favorite is entering full screen while still being able to scroll and navigate images
As you can see from this screenshot, you can easily crop out and copy to your clipboard, or save the image quickly.
Well take advantage of their Mac App Store introductory sale from $9.99 to .99Cents. Within a few seconds of purchasing it was downloaded and I was up and running with no fuss. Arcsoft does have some well documented tutorials should you need them, but looking at the icons they’re all pretty familiar if you already use most other photo editing programs.
Product Reviews
The stock photography industry started in the 1920s, by H. Armstrong Roberts . At that time, it was primarily a way for professional photographers to market the duds from commercial photography shoots. But since then, it has taken off and many people (including me) frequently use these high quality photos for professional use on print collateral, blogs and websites. Images most requested are common landmarks; conceptual and major events that can be used and reused for commercial design purposes.
There are several sites that provide these photographs in a multitude of categories. Each site has a repository for these various categories that allows for creative design assignments. The compilation of this repository reflects just how important imagery is to every medium. Here are just a few of the top, highly-used sites that will surely fulfill all your stock photography needs.
Thanks to Top Ten Reviews from TechMedia Network, showcases the 2013 Stock Photography Service Comparisons and what they offer its consumers.
Although this listing is quite helpful, these are my top picks due to availability, quality and pricing.
A leader in digital multimedia resource that includes:
- royalty-free stock photography;
- editorial images;
- video; and
- music.
Image pricing depends on what type of licensing you want and prices for royalty-free images, footage clips, etc. are based on file size. They have a broad range of editorial images as well.
Shutterstock is one of the leading global image marketplace headquartered in New York City. They have an extensive library of royalty-free stock photos, vectors, and illustrations available by subscription and a la carte. You can browse the library for free. This great news as Shutterstock adds over 100+ images to its library each day.
Known for the Internet’s “original member-generated image and design community,” reputation iStockphoto offers millions of royalty-free photographs, vector illustrations, video footage, audio tracks and Flash files from over 70,000 worldwide artists. Talk about impressive. And the smaller photos you need for blogs or as thumbnails on a document, can be as low as $1.oo!
Yes, we all know that 123rf boasts about their 19,484,862 Royalty Stock photos! But what most people don’t know is that there’s a fairly large, evolving database that houses several images FOR FREE! They have a wide variety of commercial and editorial images, video footage, audio clips, logo designs and illustrations that are easy on the eyes and your wallet.
All Posts, Photography, Product Reviews
Yes you heard me right, Adobe is offering a free copy of Lightroom 5. If you haven’t heard of or used Lightroom before, you should know it is an image editing software very similar to Photoshop – but not as hard to learn and use. The support for Lightroom 4 is awesome, there’s many tutorial videos posted by many photography enthusiasts like Kelby Training, Lynda.com, Adorama, and more.
Why is Adobe giving it away? Simple, it’s the easiest way to crowd-source for possible bugs, glitches, and feedback for enhancements before the product is fully launched.
What’s new in version 5? See what Adobe posted:
New Features in Lightroom 5 Beta
- Advanced Healing Brush – Easily remove objects and fix defects—even those with irregular shapes such as threads or lint—with a single brush stroke. Take precise control over what’s being removed as you make unwanted objects just disappear.
- Upright – Straighten tilted images with a single click. Upright analyzes images and detects skewed horizontal or vertical lines. You choose one of four correction methods, and Upright can even straighten images where the horizon is hidden.
- Radial Gradient – Lead your viewer’s eye through your images with more flexibility and control. The radial gradient tool lets you create off-center vignette effects, or multiple vignette areas within a single image.
- Offline editing with Smart Previews – Easily work with images without bringing your entire library with you. Just generate smaller stand-in files called Smart Previews. Make adjustments or metadata additions to Smart Previews and your changes will be automatically applied to the full-size originals later.
- Video slideshow sharing – Easily share your work in elegant video slide shows. Combine still images, video clips, and music in creative HD videos that can be viewed on almost any computer or device.
- Improved photo book creation – Create beautiful photo books from your images. Lightroom includes a variety of easy-to-use book templates, and now you can edit them to create a customized look. Upload your book for printing with just a few clicks.
Ok so enough of the fluff, go to Adobe and login with your username and download your copy. It will only be active to use until June so get cracking!
