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Images Part 3 - Windows Live Writer

Sep 09, 2008 by:   Tim Stanley

 

Windows Live Writer provides a handful of helpful image enhancement features.  It's not Photoshop by any means, but it's quick.

Drop Shadow

Sleigh

Photo Paper

Sleigh

Watermark

Sleigh

Polaroid Picture

The Windows Live Writer Polaroid Picture extension provides the ability to add a drop shadow, tilt pictures and add captions and change the text flow.

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Images Part 2 - Word

Sep 08, 2008 by:   Tim Stanley

Word in Microsoft Office2007 provides the ability to post entries to websites and has outstanding image manipulation features. I love image manipulation in Word the drop shadow and reflection effects are simple, and quick.

Word does make the images fuzzy and grainy.

Shadow

Double Frame, Black

Rounded and Reflection

Bevel Rectangle

Perspective Shadow

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Images Part 1 - Snagit

Sep 08, 2008 by:   Tim Stanley

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it me takes about the same time or longer to edit images as it does to type.  Snagit by TechSmith helps me a great deal. 

Snagit is not a full photo editor by any means, but it does help provide some useful embellishments to images or screen shots without requiring a lot of work.

I love Snagit for three reasons.

  1. To capture  scrolling windows (for web designs)
  2. To add annotation, drawing, and markup on the image
  3. The quick drop shadow effect

Key features I use:

  1. Edges- Drop shadow, fade, torn, wave, saw, shark tooth, beveled
  2. Watermark, resize, flip
  3. Image types: jpg, png, gif

Drop Shadow

sleigh drop shadow

Fade

sleigh fade

Watermark

 sleigh watermark

Shear

sleigh shear

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Machine Wash Effect

Sep 05, 2008 by:   Tim Stanley

Mister Retro has a great set of Photoshop plug-in's that will save a significant amount of time and effort when manipulating files in Photoshop for creating those textured and stunning artistic effects. Prices start at $49.95.

Machine wash CD 3 - Abusive Filter:

Machine Wash Abusive

Machine Wash CD 4 - Brutality Filter:

Machine Wash Brutality

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Font Tools

Sep 04, 2008 by:   Tim Stanley

What The Font and Type Chart  provide some useful interesting font tools.

What The Font does an image analysis and comes up with a list of potential fonts that are used in the image.

What The Font

 

Type Chart provides a view of what the fonts will look like in Windows, on the Macintosh, and provides the CSS used for the examples.

Type Chart

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Sharing Bookmarks

Aug 20, 2008 by:   Tim Stanley

There are numerous services popping up to help you keep track of your favorite browser bookmarks. From what I can tell from Alexa traffic, the top three are Digg, Technorati, and Delicious.  It seems like there are new services popping up every day and it can be hard to keep with with how to let users add your bookmarks to their bookmark service. AddThis.com looks like it's trying to help.

Add This

AddThis has a list of all the current bookmark sharing services and also keeps track of statistics of how many users add and share a specific URL.

Add This

BlogEngine.Net Bookmarks

Danny Douglass has published an extension for BlogEngine.Net at Add Social Bookmarking Links To Your Blog that adds several of the most commonly used social bookmarks.

social bookmark images

The icons from Danny's extension were from the Web 2 Icon set from  FastIcon.com.

FastIcon.com web2icons

I took Danny's idea and added in links for favorites and e-mail.

share image list

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Free Photos

Aug 16, 2008 by:   Tim Stanley

Where can you find some photos without paying an arm and a leg?  Here are some helpful sites to try for inspiration.

Flickr Creative Commons

Balloons Off Broadway, Grove City, 2008

StockXchng

photo by ali seifert on stock.xchng

FreeFoto.com

15_19_1---Tree--Sunrise--Northumberland_web

Paid Photos

The following sites require some payment, but most images for the web are nominal (less than $1).  The sites also offer some free photos as well.

iStockPhoto.com

iStock_000005105610Large

Fotolia.com

image

DreamsTime.com

Red Violin

 

Other Free Photo Links

Wikipedia:Public domain image resources

NASA Images

nasaNAS~5~5~21649~126419

NASA Multimedia

Star Birth

Visible Earth Images from NASA

globe_west_540

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