Photoshop Pluggins

I am generally not a fan of photoshop pluggins however recently I have been using two which are particularly good. I brought both from the same website http://www.fredmiranda.com/software/ and they were both reasonably priced at $25 which at the moment for us Brits works out at around £17 which is not bad at all.

Velvia Vison firstly allows you to add contrast and intensity to your pictures. With a few simple clicks the ability to change a picture from one which maybe a throw away picture into one which looks like a perfect photograph. The functionality is easy with the use of a few sliders and drop down menus you are able to render your pictures in no time.

Secondly I have been using a pluggin called SR pro. We all know sometimes how hard it is for example to take a photograph of a building in shadow and not over expose the nice bright blue sky. With SR pro you have the ability to brighten up the shadows and keep the blue sky. Again a few clicks and your building looks like you took the shot all by your self.

Both of these are pretty neat and give great results, installing them was pretty easy and they appear with any other pluggins on the file menu within photoshop. Check them out I am sure that you won't be disappointed.

Anthony

Gallery Software

I searched the Internet for so long to find how to create the perfect photography website. It is generally a hard process, you want the photos to be displayed with quality that will help the viewer want to buy them. However the images themselves must not take to long to load as this will prevent the users from staying and looking in the first place.

The Internet is a great place to find code and Google now even has is own code search which could help you to find out how to do it. Thumbnails with a java roll over or click function will do the job very nicely, but is a little fiddly. Plus the fact that if you are not so used to a computer programming you want to be spending your time selling and taking photographs not learning strange computer languages.

I finally came across a neat solution which cost a few pounds but helped no end. Its a Flash pluggin called Slideshow Pro. Once you have installed it there are a vast amount of options which help you create a gallery which suits your needs and website. For example it has the ability to change all of the colours to whatever you want them to be. All the options are placed in a simple to use menu which is point and click.

The photos themselves are fed to the gallery via an XML file, however this is nothing to be scared of a simple to follow manual is provided with the software and a new gallery can be set up in minutes of purchase.

One of my efforts can be seen here. I really recommend this product its easy to use and gives great results. You probably could do this yourself but to be honest why bother, its all there for you.

Anthony

How to make thumbnails for web sites.

I Have been using a simple piece of software for some time now. Its made by a company called fookes and can be found at the following address: http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs/ . This will enable you to resize images both in terms of megabytes to kilobytes and in terms of mesurement. This will reduce the loading time of your website and increase the chance that your visitors stay.

Another good reason for not placeing the original image on your website is so that people can not use your perfect image and enlarge them. The smaller image will simply lose its quality when used for anything else than being viewed on your website.

Its freeware so you can use it right now, give it and see what you think.

Anthony