PsPrint Blog » Free

Great (and free!) places to download high-res stock photography

Valerie — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:30:12 +0000

You know I love free! One of my pet peeves is blurry pictures. With these great sites, you won’t be on my bad side … lol.

Thousands of free high-resolution photos are available for use, and downloading them is quick and easy.

Stock.xchng (www.sxc.hu)
Morgue File (www.morguefile.com)
Open Photo (www.openphoto.net)
Official PSDs (www.officialpsds.com)
Photogen (www.photogen.com)
Twice Pix (www.twicepix.net)
Image After (www.imageafter.com)
Stock Vault (www.stockvault.net)
Nations Illustrated (www.nationsillustrated.com)
Freerange Stock (www.freerangestock.com)
Free Pixels (www.freepixels.com)
Bigfoot (www.bigfoot.com)

What websites do you use to get free high-resolution photography?

15 must-see Photoshop tutorials

Brian — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:31:10 +0000

If you love Photoshop, you’ll love it even more after learning the techniques in these tutorials:

Coloring skin and body in Photoshop and how to mimic the natural play of light upon the body.

How to create a professional Twitter background – a quick-and-easy tutorial for customizing your Twitter page.

Remember how fun watercolors used to be? You can recreate a watercolor effect with Photoshop!

Pop art a la Lichtenstein – really cool stuff for the poppy designer!

Very, very cool Photoshop tutorial on how to transform a woman’s photograph into an eerie doll face and more.

How to design a website using the 960 Grid System, an oft-employed web design technique that looks great. This tutorial includes a free 960 GS download so you can quickly deploy an original 960 design.

A tutorial that covers how to make a DVD cover with Photoshop. The techniques used here could also be applied to movie posters.

Dioramas are cool, especially when you combine several images and blur/focus PS techniques to highlight your subject.

Want to master the Photoshop warp tool? This tutorial shows you the way…

Paint splashed over the face of a photographic subject – nice. What’s really neat is that this liquid Photoshop technique can be used in many, many design applications.

Yet another awesome website design tutorial. This has a clean Web 2.0 feel that many designers like to emulate.

A very unique and creative – yet clean and easy-to-follow – website design. The techniques employed here are invaluable.

Learn how to use the Photoshop mask tool to create this model effect from a photo.

When the outer glow blending option doesn’t quite cut it – use these tips to achieve an outstanding glow emanating from your subjects.

Super cool fallen angel tutorial that shows you how to blend a woman and a bird on a textured background.

What are your favorite Photoshop techniques?

Portfolio applications for graphic designers

Brian — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:13:48 +0000

If you’re a graphic designer, you know you need an online portfolio. You probably have one already. And if you don’t, you can always find free Flash, JavaScript and plug-ins for popular CMS systems such as Wordpress, Joomla! and others.

But there’s more to building a great online portfolio than simply uploading some images to your site or a dynamic framework that showcases your skills in fluid motion.

Social networking.

If you haven’t engaged in social networking for your portfolio, you’re in for a treat (assuming you’re good at what you do. You are good, right?). There are many, many ways to socially network your skills online.

Why spread your portfolio into the vastness of the web when you can update it on a central server? Exposure, traffic, sales; in that order.

Do you get a quarter million visitors a month like behance.net does? It might be worth your while to post your portfolio there. Here are a few other graphic design portfolio websites your work should be listed on:

Designer’s Toolbox
Carbon Made
BeHance
Deviant Art
CPU Luv
Coroflot
Flickr
MySpace
Facebook
Elance
Guru

The importance of keywords in post titles

Jerry — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:50:15 +0000

There are two camps on this topic. One believes that keywords are all important. Why bother writing if people can’t find your blog to read anyway. The other camp thinks that your content should pull in links and then readers. They say that writing for humans is the most important issue of blogging to begin with.

In truth keywords matter. Maybe not for the reasons that the one camp thinks, though.

Keyword research is nearly mystic. It is like you are reading the minds of your potential readers and it is free or really low cost.

Before search engines, there were focus groups. A fairly unreliable group of humans attempting to answer what they would do if…. What they said in front of the group was rarely what they did at home.

If you are writing any type of headline, on or offline, you have to do keyword research. Any headline should call for the attention of a target group. The it should be wrapped up in value to the reader.

The top keywords should not be your target. The long tails will have fewer searches each, but combined they will bring more traffic than the number one keyword.

The perfect way to write headlines for humans is to use niche phrases. They are more specific and; therefore, make a better headline. Better headlines lead to better content if you follow the headline. Always write the headline first.

All search engines want to reflect what is important to people. That is why the determine relevancy on links and anchor text.

That is the long and short of why keywords matter in post titles. You need to target an audience in order to be heard and read more often. You will get diggs, links, and more relevant search engine traffic.

Best free Drupal themes

Brian — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:38:54 +0000

I write a lot about content management systems, probably Joomla! more than others. But by far my favorite CMS is Drupal. The system is powerful, extensible and customizable to a degree unmatched by other systems. The core delight of Drupal is that every add-on seems to work seamlessly with all other add-ons, while other systems have add-ons that conflict with one another and cause hellish nightmares of PHP code and .htaccess horrors.

One of the things I love about Drupal is the free themes — many of them look great and they’re easy to change (Joomla! is the same way, really). Here are three of my favorites, and why:

I love Acquia Marina because it’s easy to work with and customize, if you even want to. The entire template is elegant and Web 2.0, including form fields, which typically look blocky with most other themes. A bit of CSS can clear that up, sure, but it’s nice to not have to code any more than I have to (since I’m NOT a developer by trade, my knowledge is limited). Acquia Marina also features 15-plus block regions, allowing you to shape your site’s features however you’d like.

Contrast is another favorite of mine, mostly because it’s incredibly simple to work with. Contrast doesn’t offer a lot of options, but the layout is clean and the navigation is intuitive. Like Acquia Marina, Contrast is easy to customize and serves as a great base for the Ubercart shopping cart, though this isn’t its intended purpose.

For the hardcore custom Drupal nuts, I favor the Zen theme because it’s meant to be a developer’s template you can build on to create your own custom theme. I’ve used it on several projects and it has performed well to date. For Drupal customization, Zen is the platform to build with.

What are your favorite free Drupal themes?

Productivity software for graphic designers

Brian — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:06:10 +0000

Productivity software is generally described as software that makes businesses (or people) more productive. Simple and self-explanatory. But each niche profession (or personality) has a unique set of tasks that productivity software can automate or otherwise make more efficient. For graphic designers, programs such as Adobe’s Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash), QuarkXPress, and MS Virtual Basic would all be considered productivity software.

But what about the simple, time-intensive tasks graphic designers tediously undertake? Things such as identifying a font, changing a CSS style, or choosing a complimentary color can take hours away from more “important” tasks such as creating your designs and choosing imagery. The creative can be stifled by the banal.

Some of my favorite productivity software for graphic designers include:

FileZilla — An FTP application that lets you instantly edit server-side files. This comes in handy when you need to make a simple CSS change or swap a banner image.

7-ZIP — Lets you compile, compress, and unpack a myriad of file types that the built-in Windows application can’t. If you work with large file transfers, Z-ZIP and FileZilla are necessities.

IdentifFont — Identify a font by name, style or by answering a series of quick questions.

Open Source CMS systems — Content Management Systems, once put in place, save time and money. When you need to make a portfolio update, you simply fill out a form and upload your file. If you want to change content, add products or do anything else in a flash, there’s probably a CMS that facilitates the action. Learn to design and find a good developer (if you don’t code) for systems such as Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal. Content is still king, and Open Source CMS is here to stay.

Color scheme generators/color wheels — Here’s a great list of 25 color scheme generators.

Whatsitscolor.com — Upload an image or submit a link to an image and Whatsistscolor generates a color scheme based on the colors in the image. This is valuable if you like the look of a website, brochure or postcard and want to emulate its color scheme. Color Hunter does the same, perhaps slightly cleaner.

Don’t forget that Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Quark and other software have add-ons, plug-ins, actions and a whole host of other time-saving devices available for free download. Try this list of Photoshop plug-ins for starters.

Of course, software suites such as Microsoft Office and OpenOffice deserve a mention, as well as the many commercial project management applications. For free and simple project tracking, check out FreeMind.

Image CC License Flickr.