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Images Part 3 - Windows Live Writer
Windows Live Writer provides a handful of helpful image enhancement features. It's not Photoshop by any means, but it's quick.
Drop Shadow
Photo Paper
Watermark
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
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
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.
- To capture scrolling windows (for web designs)
- To add annotation, drawing, and markup on the image
- The quick drop shadow effect
Key features I use:
- Edges- Drop shadow, fade, torn, wave, saw, shark tooth, beveled
- Watermark, resize, flip
- Image types: jpg, png, gif
Drop Shadow
Fade
Watermark
Shear
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Machine Wash Effect
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 CD 4 - Brutality Filter:
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Font Tools
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.
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.
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Sharing Bookmarks
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.
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.
The icons from Danny's extension were from the Web 2 Icon set from FastIcon.com.
I took Danny's idea and added in links for favorites and e-mail.
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Free Photos
Where can you find some photos without paying an arm and a leg? Here are some helpful sites to try for inspiration.
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.
Other Free Photo Links
Wikipedia:Public domain image resources