Computer and Photography Tips

Midweek Geek Links for 6-11-2009

It’s time for this week’s Geek Links!

• If you’re in need of a good laugh, check out Awkard Family Photos.
• Very cool concept photography from Martin Wilson. No Photoshop here; he creates montages by piecing together frames from an entire roll of film. Very meticulously done.
• Got a hankering for an Amazon Kindle but aren’t ready to fork out the cash? Search for a used Kindle at UsedKindleGear.com.
• MacUpdate Promo is a good resource for getting quality Mac software for a discount price. New deals running weekly!
• ColoRotate is a very cool way to come up with custom color themes for your designs.

8 Things to Know Before Hiring a Web Developer

Last week I was brought into a project for my wife’s boss, a local dentist, who wanted to freshen up his existing site. I was glad to offer my services for free, as I have had more than one dentist visit that was “on the house.” So I sat down, eager to study his existing site and come up with a plan.

Things went from bad to worse as I learned more about his site and the company he had chosen to develop it. Frankly, I was surprised the company he used, Internet Dental Alliance, was still in business.

Building Websites with Master Pages (Visual Studio)

Last week I was tasked with building a site from scratch with a very short deadline. Normally, I’d accomplish this with a Wordpress install and a few theme tweaks, but my bosses didn’t want to go that route. I thought I was going to have to do things the old fashioned way (Dreamweaver, lots of typing, lots of coffee) until a friend of mine told me to take a look at Master Pages in Visual Studios.

Adobe Lightroom Workflow - Part 2 - Flag, Rate, and Filter

In the previous article of this series we took an in-depth look at importing your photos into Lightroom. Now that your photos are imported, let’s take a few moments to go through them and tag them with a flag, rating or color so we can easily filter through them during the editing process.

It’s sometimes easy to underestimate the importance of a good tag and filtering process. If done right this can be a huge time saver. It’s also handy for archiving; when you return to these photos after weeks, months or years have passed you are immediately able to see the original tags you applied.

Digital Photography Tips - White Balance with a Gray Card

One thing that often gets overlooked by amateur photographers is getting accurate color in your photos. The first step to getting good color is making sure you have paid attention to your white balance. White balance, sometimes known as color balance, is basically making sure that white appears as white in a given lighting scenario.

Many people deal with white balance by simply setting their digital camera to Auto White Balance (AWB). While cameras do fairly well at achieving good white balance automatically, there are a few steps you can take to insure more accurate depiction of colors.

Edit Multiple Pictures with Photoshop

One of the best things about digital photography is how easily you can take dozens of pictures and quickly share them with your friends and family. No longer do we have to keep up with envelopes of negatives or worry about getting your film developed. However, with each improved model of digital camera, the number of pixels used to create our photos increases, often by the millions.

This isn’t a problem when it comes to printing your photos. In fact, the more pixels you have the better your printed photos will look. The problem arises when we just want to share these pictures on the web or email a few of them to a friend or relative. You see, the more pixels an image uses, the larger its file size will be. Large file sizes mean longer downloads for your friends and family, and can also be the reason why your emails won’t go through (many email servers won’t accept messages larger than 10mb).

So, we are often left with the task of resizing these images so that they are “web ready.” That is, reduced in dimension (how large they appear on screen) and in file size (how much room they take up on your hard drive). Resizing images is a simple task, but it can quickly become a boring and tedious task if you have more than just a few images to resize.

Photoshop Tips - Advanced Black and White Conversion Using Actions

There are several ways to convert your photos to black and white inside Photoshop; quick options like the Desaturate command or simply adding in a Black & White Adjustment layer. But there are other more advanced options available within Photoshop that can give you killer black and white results.

The thing about black and white conversion is that one process doesn’t always work the best for every photo. There are several different methods because sometimes certain methods work better than others for the picture in question.

What we’ll cover here is a quick way to to create an Action that will automatically add the most popular black and white conversion techniques to your photo. We’ll combine this action with Layer Comps to give you an easy way to run through each of the conversion options to get a glimpse of what works best with your photo. I tend to lovingly refer to this technique as, Not Yo Mama’s Black and White Conversion.