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Photography & Graphics Links

Photoshop Tools | Tutorials & Sites with Active User Forums
Great Photo & Graphics Sites | Printing Photos & Books

Photoshop Tools

ACDSee

Sure Photoshop has finally included an image browser and even pokey Microsoft crammed image previews into Windows a while back (if you leave the Explorer in default mode -- lame of you I must add), BUT none of them offer the richness of ACDSee's features -- view video, PDF's, ALL image formats (including nearly every camera makers native RAW formats), lossless rotation, browser every image on your computer based on date, and one of the best ways to print -- contact sheets or individual images. Cheap at about $50.

Picture Code's Noise Ninja

 

No matter which camera you own you'll get some noise, particularly at high ISOs, and this program (Photoshop plugin currently in beta) will knock it out miraculously. Demo versions are available, but they do watermark images with a grid. From their website:

"Noise - the digital equivalent of film grain - afflicts every digital camera produced today. At the high ISO settings required for indoor photography and fast-action sports, noise can be so acute that it makes an image look like sandpaper. Even "clean" images shot at low ISO may reveal noise when enlarged."

Imagenomic's Noiseware

Along the same lines of NoiseNinja, but offers a free "Community Edition". I've not used this (yet) so I'm posting this link mainly as an alternative to NoiseNinja.

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Tutorials & Sites with Active User Forums

CreativeCow

Awesome AfterEffects and Photoshop tutorials, plus you'll find that many experts in the field participate on the forums. I met the AE team at DV Expo West a year or two ago and they were just great; helpful, smelled dandy -- no complaints. Start here, you may go nowhere else.

Photo.net

Some good articles including one on RAW v. JPEG files.

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Great Photo & Graphics Sites

Daily Dose of Imagery on TopLeftPixel

A really talented guy in Toronto posts a photo a day. Worth a viewing for both the photography and a glimpse of how Canada's coolness and beauty.

deviantART

A day's timehole unto itself. Graphics, photos, even non-prose (poetry?) ready for easy browsing. Need that just right pic or abstract graphics bed? Start here.

OpenPhoto.net

The site needs love, but the idea is grand. Their description:

The Open Photo Project is a free stock photo community devised and supervised by Michael Jastremski (http://oldtimeynerd.net). Owing largely to years of prior research, the goal of o2 is to unite photographers and users through Creative Commons licensing.
  • free image storage
  • free stock photo library
  • integrated licensing
  • syndication tools
  • open source
  • your own (username.openphoto.net) website

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fotolia.com

With so many digicams is it any wonder there are sites such as fotolia.com where wnyone can sell their photos? Here's their site summary:

Fotolia is the first worldwide social marketplace for royalty free stock images, allowing individuals and professionals to legally buy and share stock images and illustrations.

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Printing Photos & Books

Until quite recently, with Ludlow's purchase of the Canon Pixma iP5000, printing photos had never held much appeal. Suddenly, however, with rich colors and borderless printing sitting there, networked, available at a moment's notice, well, an obsession was born.

It quickly came to pass, however, that home printing's costs would curb the feeding of this new addiction. And in unexpected ways. For example, what color of ink do most folks run out of first? Yeah, that's what I thought, but no, it's yellow. And replacing all four barrels is a pricey affair. How much? About $12 a cartridge. CMYK. Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching: $50! Then there's the paper. For 50 sheets 4"x6" Canon Photo Paper Plus Glossy one must shell-out 13 bucks (26 cents a sheet)! Fortunately, a timely sale at Staples ($6 a pack, we're now down to 12 cents a sheet) meant our shelves were stocked, but now I was itching to know, how much am I paying per print? Ignoring the (plummeting) price of the printer, that's fixed, so focus on the expendables. We printed a couple of hundred prints before sucking the ink dry. Cost? 200x0.12 + $48.00 = $74 for 200 or $0.37 per print. And that's using the free toaster, sorry, printer. Even without amortorizing a printer and the price of hard disks (or DVDs if you store your photos off-line) -- however you cut it, the "free" of digital cameras suddenly ain't so free. Enter online printing.

Most online services give you some set number of free prints for creating an account, make use of these to compare. So far I've only used Kodak's ofoto (being sure to turn off their horrifying PerfectPicture color mangling) and have used a 40% Off coupon for 15 cent prints (regular price a quarter). Note, however, that this isn't such a deal when the shipping for 214 prints was $12.50 effectively adding about 6 cents to the price of each print. Fortunately, they offer a store delivery option for $1.50. Quality was fine -- a bit dark and the paper a bit on the flimsy side -- but well under the 0.37 I was paying for home printing.

My next batch is going out to WinkFlash, with 99 cent flat-rate shipping and 12 cent prints (no coupons) I'll gamble the $10 bucks to test and compare.

Expect the competition to merge, shake, cajole and whatnot as this business tries to figure a way to make a profit on 4x6 prints. Sam's and Costco both have offerings, as does WalMart, which some swear by. Higher-end services like Adorama hope to segment the market according to pro versus home buyers. One annoyance / distinguishing trait is bulk upload tools or ftp access. Pro sites do offer ftp of your photos. All offer photo galleries. Most allow you to share galleries with others (why wouldn't they want your grandma to see -- and BUY prints?). Hopefully standards for uploading are just a short ways off, because downloading these bulk tools, most only available for Windows, is a PITA and annoying.

One way these folks are going to keep you from using that dusty printer supporting your coffee cup and B&H catalogs is through photo books, but with prices of $1.99 per page (not sheet, that's page, a sheet is two pages) and hefty set-up fees most people will opt-out of this until the price drops some more -- which it will. Thanks to Apple for even making folks aware of the possibilities, but look elsewhere for innovation and pricing. I've used Lulu's printing, but the quality, of the print and the binding, is simply not comparable to what others offer. However, for $0.24 a page it's a good way to make a souvenir program of your photos, if not exactly your own Mapplethorpe coffee table book. (I'll use Lulu again, but hope that at some point they up binding options and print quality)

Bottom line: if you don't need the immediacy or complete control possible with a good home printer, online is the way to go It's a compromise, but for the foreseeable future, until one isn't locked into the high prices of home papers, inks, etc, it is a economical one.

Here are two comparisons of the most popular online print services (note that services are changing on a weekly basis, and some of the info on these charts might already be somewhat dated) :

  1. DigitalPhotos101 Best Digital Photo Services
  2. Photo Print Provider Comparison Chart

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