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Quick photo editing – Online and FREE

Doink — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:57:20 +0000

How many of you, designers or photographers, needed a quick retouch of a picture you just took without spending tons of money on software you’re not probably using very often?

Well, just for this matter, the online free photo editor websites come to our help! Quick and easy to use, they have some basic tools and presets. You can re-size, crop, rotate, adjust noise, luminosity, correct red-eye effect, distorts, different filters, frames, doodles, text and many more great stuff.

Thus said, let’s dig in!

One of my favorite sites of this kind is Picnik. And I’m going to tell you why. First of all, it has a very appealing, fresh design and very user-friendly. Simple and attractive.

In the “Library” section, you can upload practically from anywhere, whether is from your computer or on the web. The “Edit” section contains quick manipulation tools like exposure, sharpening, colors and red-eye effect. And for the users unfamiliar yet with photo editing, in each tab there’s a auto-fix button.

In the “Create” tab you’ll find frames, quick photo effects that usually would take a while to do manually: frames, masks, slide shows, focus changes and more. The “Advanced” tab contains Levels, Curves, Dodge and Burn, similar to the ones in Photoshop.

Here is are some portraits edited with the quick autofixes.

The original image.

Autocolors preset. It takes the dominant color and turns it into a filter.

Autofix preset.

8% Sharpen.

I’ve played around with more photos, with a larger variety of colors and I still get pretty good results.Also, the advanced tools similar to the Photoshop ones are satisfying; they are a bit more simple, but they get the job done.

It’s a very enjoyable site, practical, useful and fun to play with.

Another cool photo editing site is Fotoflexer. It’s similar to Picnik, but with a different user interface. It provides similar sets of filters, but in a more compact way.

The best section of the site is in the “Geek” tab, where the goodies are: smart resizing, curves, levels, morphing and smart cutouts.

I edited the same image and i got the same results as in Picnik, so I wont post them. I can’t wait till they finalize the Curves tool (it’s in Beta at the moment), I want to see how it works. I mean, a replica of Curves from Photoshop free and online? Count me in!

A third site that does online photo editing is Lunapic. It has a large gallery of effects in very compact lists. This site is not useful for your casual user or site visitors, for it does not provide interactive previews of what you are about to do. In return, advanced users of photo editing software would find this a meadow of heaven: lots of details and parameters in which an average user would drown. Visit this site if you like to play around with numbers.

A great tool for advanced users only!

Pixlr is your basic Photoshop in a web page. And a very cool thing about it is not only the familiar UI from Photoshop, but it also provides the menus in 13 different languages! It’s a very useful tool if you want to do a quick photo editing when you’re not in front of a computer that has Photoshop installed or just want to play around with effects.

A great website! Awesome looks, user friendly, easy to use!

Phixr is another site where you can edit photos quickly. It’s effective if you want to do a very quick and simple operation, such as resizing, cropping, adding fun stuff or adding other photos in it. A simple site for simple editing. It has a UI similar to MSPaint, but each button will expand to a whole new menu. What I like about it is the compression of all photo adjustment tools into a single menu. It has Temperature, Exposure, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and Hue in a single tab, which makes it very useful when you need a quick adjustment.

Freeonlinephotoeditor works as well for a quick editing. The site has a simple, yet cool look and user-friendly. It has the basic photo manipulation tools and some presets of special effects, but only a few are adjustable. The simple menu lets you learn its structure very quick and finish your job fast and easy. A site made for its practicability and not for eye-candy, just the way a visitor likes.

These are all great tools when it comes to quick effects and adjustments, feel free to use the one that suits you most.

The only disadvantage of all these sites is that they allow limited dimensions of a picture (about 1600×1600 px).

GET AMAZING VECTORS BY SUBSCRIPTION FROM VECTORIUS.NET

Doink — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:48:12 +0000

Are your clients breathing in the back of your neck, deadline is closing in and you’re not even close to the end of the project?

Well, Vectorious.net comes to you armed to the teeth with tons of awesome vector artwork just for that matter: an arsenal of 10587 vector images(at the moment). Whether it’s about business, vintage, music, buildings, abstract, backgrounds, people, seasonal, they have it!

A unique feature that can put them on the top of a designer’s favorite vector sources is the extra paid attention to the line art, a small detail that apparently can make a huge difference between an average and an excellent vector.

Download some of the free samples and take a closer look. The level of detail even at high zoom-in is simply stunning! The line art is basically close to perfection!

About pricing?

Up to 3.8 cents/vector. That’s how low their prices go!

Subscription plans for tons of images are:

600 downloads –$ 30 – 1 Month – Basic Membership
1800 downloads – $80 – 3 Months – Plus Membership
3600 downloads – $140 – 6 Months – Max Membership

An amazing deal for some amazing artwork!

Weekly fresh vectors are added every week, so there’s always a good reason to go back.

Also FREE vectors await for everyone to try out.

Shopping carts for downloadable products

Alex — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:38:01 +0000

If you are planning to sell downloadable (or digital) products such as software, music, eBooks or any other kind of files here are the best shopping carts that can help you easily start your business with the right foot.

I’ve used and tested all the software included in this article and bellow is my personal opinion about each one of them.

Magento

Magento is a very powerful free open-source shopping cart that becomes really popular due to is capabilities. Magento is really extraordinary and it comes with some amazing features. Its flexibility and features makes it one of the best shopping carts at this moment. But because its really a complex software and somehow difficult to customize I wouldn’t recommend it for small shops that sell only a couple of products. The other thing is that it requires a lot of resources and if you don’t host with a company that is “magento friendly” you would need to spend extra on a vps or dedicated server. Supports downloadable products very well and gives you a lot of options. We use it in our online shop Desigious.com for more than 6000 products.

Cubecart

Cubecart is a cool shopping cart with lots of features. It has a paid and a free version. What makes Cubecart great is the community behind it, you will find a lot of free and paid extensions and templates. It’s easier to customize than Magento but it doesn’t have so many features. On the forums you can easily find any problem you may have. The free version lacks a few features but you will find free mods to add. This feature makes it almost as good as the paid version. Cubecart does a good job when it comes to downloadable items and you can have an unlimited number of products. A nice cubecart store is Estelle’s Cubecart mods.

WP e-Commerce

WP e-Commerce is a cool Wordpress plugin that transforms your blog into a full online shop. There are a few other plugins that do the same thing and maybe better but this is definitely the most common. It integrates in your blog very well and has a bunch of cool features. If you want to expand its capabilities you have a few cool extensions that you can buy and create an awesome shop. If you have a blog and want to sell a few digital products this is what you need. Icondock.com is a good example of a really cool shop that uses the plugin.

CS-Cart

CS-Cart is a professional shopping cart with a lot…, I mean A LOT of features in it. Its has and ajax admin interface, is SEO friendly, has an affiliate program in it, gift certificates and more. This is not a free shopping cart, it costs $265 per license but for some it may worth every cent, you get a really good cart with lots of features. Go Media has a really cool implementation of the cart for their Arsenal.

Ubercart

Ubercart is an open source ecommerce package that integrates with Drupal. It comes with a lot of features and settings and of course with the community support behind this cool module. It can be enhanced with other modules that integrate seamless in Drupal. If you are used to the Drupal CMS this may be the ideal setup for you but if you are not, well… it may take a while to get used to it.

Virtuemart

Virtuemart is a free plugin that turns your website into a full ecommerce solution that integrates in Joomla and Mambo CMS. With over 1,5 million downloads this extension really rocks! It has a huge community and it can be extended with the help of other extensions made specially for Virtuemart. If you want a powerful CMS with ecommerce capabilities that supports digital downloads you need to use Joomla+Virtuemart. A good example for digital downloads is Tshirt-factory.com.

Prestashop

This is one professional shopping cart packed with lots of features and best of all is open source. Very easy to use and with a friendly admin interface makes Prestashop one of best shopping carts. The community for this software is very active and you get answers for your questions/problems really fast. The developers worked really hard to make this shopping cart a really fast, reliable and intuitive software.

There are a lot of factors that influence the decision in choosing the right cart to sell your products. There are many options to consider and you need to do it carefully.
That’s about it, there were a few more that I’ve tested but they were either very expensive and wasn’t worth it or really bad. If you know other that must be mentioned please do tell.

How to create a passive income as a designer?

Alex — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 11:00:52 +0000

Every once in a while is hard to find work or maybe business is a bit slow so is good to have an extra income, a passive income. If you are a designer and you want to have a passive income here are few things that can help you achieve that.

Use the designs that that were rejected by your clients and sell them on Graphic leftovers or a similar marketplace.
Sell email services to your clients under your name with Campaignmonitor.
Sell templates, a handy list of 10 places to sell templates.
Sell photos or vectors on Shutterstock.com, Istockphoto.com, Fotolia.com or Graphicriver.
Design and sell products on Cafepress or Zazzle, not only t-shirts you can sell a bunch of other stuff.
Create a blog and add some affiliate banners to earn commissions or sell advertising if you have enough visitors.
Write an ebook and sell it.
Write articles or tutorials for blogs and magazines.

These are only a few things you can do, of course this takes time and the profit from this does not come over night. You can work on some of this stuff when you are between projects and spend your time more effectively and why not maybe even profitably.

10 easy-do portrait-based tutorials

cosmin — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:37:27 +0000

Here’s a list of ten Photoshop tutorials that manipulate, or achieve different stylized portraits, using various techniques. Most of them are pretty easy to achieve, but have quite a powerful effect in the end! Enjoy!

1. Creating an unique profile image

2. How to create a grunge style illustration with stains

3. Create a high contrast, artistic portrait

4. Stylized photo tutorial

5. How to apply textures to uneven surfaces

6. Create cool watercolor effects in Photoshop

7. How to create a simple face text portrait in Photoshop

8. Create weaved effect from a photo

9. Roman fresco

10. Andy Warhol pop art silkscreen effect

Retro Roundup – 101 Free Resources

Georgiana — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:08:27 +0000

Searching for that Retro Look ? Wouldn’t be great to find all the resources you could ever need in the same place? Because that’s exactly what we did. We’ve taken all the best retro vectors, textures, brushes and fonts… and made a big happy retro family. So take your time, look around and download all you want.

And yes, we know you are gonna Bookmark this page. We’ re ok with that.

Free Retro Vectors

Designious Vintage Mega Pack 4 free samples

Designious Vintage Mega Pack 5 free samples

Designious Vintage Mega Pack 6 free samples

Retro blue background

Vintage bike

21 Free Vector Boomboxes

Retro Vector Car

Free psychadelic van vector illustration

Free Vintage Flame Vector Frame

Vintage Train

Vintage Angel Vector Collection

80s Girl

Free Retro Textures

Vintage Musk

Textures 02 – Vintage Floral

Vintage II Texture Pack

Vintage polka dot texture

7. Vintage strip texture

Art Nouveau Pattern Texture

Retro wall paper

Use This 259

Old paper

Vintage and blood stains

Fall Time 20

Free Retro Brushes

1940 Cosmopolitan Brushes

Old Postage Stamp Brushes

Rock & Rol

Risingsun Brushes

Retro Dynamic Brushes

Vintage Brushes

Free Retro Fonts

Web Design Inspiration

Georgiana — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 12:28:13 +0000

Getting inspiration from other great projects is always a solution for a creativity block. We made that even easier for you by bringing you our favorite sites. All of these web sites combine originality and functionality awfully well and are guaranteed to end with a ” why haven’t I thought of that” effect on you . We really are sorry for that but keep in mind that it’s all part of the process of growing.

11. qualitypeoples.com

12. alifelski.com

13. drinkzzz.com

14. thedarlingtree.com

15. kalchmann.com

Ten Amazing Free Photoshop Brushes

Georgiana — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:23:38 +0000

Lots and lots of free Photoshop brushes out there and it’s sometimes hard to choose between all of them. So we offer some help and we bring you our favorite 10 brushes. Hope you find them very useful!

1. Cs 4 Brushes from Edelihu

2. Retro Circles from Punksafetypin

3.Fresh Foliage Photoshop Brushes for High Resolution from Designfruit

4. Abstract Tech Brushes on Deviant Art

5. Splats and Splatters from Obsidian Dawn

6.Shape Brushes from Q Brushes

7. Graphic Pack also from Q Brushes

8.Ultimate Grunge Brushes from My Photoshop Brushes

9. IHEA Vector Curves Brushes on Getbrushes

10. And finally the Watercolor brushes from Bittbox

Complete list to submit design news

Alex — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:50:30 +0000

Any blogger wants to increase his website traffic and one of the methods is to promote his articles through website like Digg, Buzz, Stumbleupon and Delicious. Now there are websites that use a “community news” section where you can submit your design related article and attract more visitors.

Bellow is a list of 32 websites from where you can get a lot of free traffic by submitting your articles:

- Design Float

- Design Bump

- Graphic Design Links

- Devmarks

- Wscoop

- Dzone

- Designm.ag

- Design Related

- Fuel your creativity

- Css Globe

- Sharebrain