In an effort to promote their stock photography, Crestock offers a Daily Free Stock Photo from their Web site. This isn’t just a Web-sized image, these are full resolution, high-quality images you can download in a variety of sizes. A new image is available each day, but once the new image is posted, the image from the previous day is gone forever, so you have to remember to grab it. Crestock has an RSS Feed for the free images to show you which image they’re giving away each day, or you can just add it to your start tabs in your Web browser. All you need to do is register with Crestock to download these images. I’ve been downloading these images for quite some time, and have used several of them for print projects, as well as this site. I like Crestock because the images they provide seem to be more colorful and creatively shot than many stock photo suppliers. They’re one of the first places I search at when I need an image for a client project.
Tagged: free
Free paint splatter texture
Bittbox has posted the latest Free Texture Tuesday offering. Paint Splatters, a group of high resolution textures available for download now. You can grab textures from all over the Web, but Bittbox consistently offers very nice textures, which are high resolution enough to use in most all print work. In particular, I like the black-only paint texture (the last preview image on the page) in this weeks download. Don’t forget to check back at Bittbox each Tuesday for a new set of textures.
Free digital photography e-magazine available
Photographybb.com has their latest e-Magazine available for download now. The holiday season is upon us and what better way to celebrate than to grab a cup of hot chocolate, kick back, and enjoy the December Issue of the PhotographyBB Online Magazine. This month, we head back to Moscow where Jon Ayres gives us a look at how the holidays are celebrated in Russia. We’ve also made some slight changes to the magazine to include more “how-to” style articles. Check out this month’s issue for:
- Night photography techniques – Part II – Painting with Light and Holiday Lights
- Best Shooting Gear for the Holidays
- Better Portrait Posing Techniques
- Mastering Photoshop Brushes
- Pro Retouching Techniques
- and more!
Be sure to grab all the back issues while you’re there. All PhotogrpahyBB issues are available as downloadable PDFs, ranging in size from 5-12MB each.
Free font: Megalopolis
The Smeltery is offering Megalopolis Extra free for download. Megalopolis is an OpenType font featuring extended language support as well as alternate characters, ligatures and more. You’re free to use the font in personal or commercial work. I really like the extra “ornamental” characters in this font – you can view a full specimen sheet on the site in PDF format. Thanks to the Smeltery for sharing this font, as well as all the other freebie fonts on their site!
Free weathered wood Photoshop brushes
PSDTuts is offering an exclusive set of 15 Weathered Wood Brushes for download. The brushes, created by Room122, are all high resolution (2500 x 2500 pixels), perfect for use as backgrounds on large print design projects, as well as Web work.
Free Christmas Mail stationery pack
iPresentee offers free Christmas Mail Stationery templates designed especially for the Christmas holiday to use with OSX’s Mail application. The Christmas Stationery package includes ten wonderful templates: Santa Claus Letter, New Year’s Day, Christmas Wreath, Merry Christmas, Gift, Snowman, Christmas Letter, Christmas Socks, Santa Claus and Christmas Tree. Christmas is on its way and there’s a good cheer everywhere. The Christmas Mail Stationery templates comes with an installer to make sure the templates end up in the right place and would be displayed in Apple Mail New Message Stationery menu automatically. Mail Stationery templates requires any Macintosh computer running Mac OS X 10.5 with bundled Mail application.
Adobe CS4 Printing Guide available for download
Adobe has posted the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Printing Guide, which serves as both a detailed technical reference for handling Adobe Creative Suite 4 Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and Acrobat files from your customers, and as a training tool for your staff. If you want to know more about graphics, exporting and printing, font issues, working with book files, output troubleshooting, color management and more, you’ll find this downloadable PDF guide extremely helpful. Direct-download links: CS4 Print Guide – low-res (PDF, 4.6mb) CS4 Print Guide – high res (PDF, 18.1mb) If you’re still using Adobe Creative Suite 3, you can download the Creative Suite 3 Printing Guides here: CS3 Print Guide – low res (PDF, 6.6mb) CS3 Print Guide – high res (PDF, 24.4mb)
50 free designer Photoshop brush sets
In my ever-present quest for more Photoshop brushes, I’ve come across a list of 50 free Photoshop brush sets from SixRevisions. The sets focus on modern design trends such as vintage, retro, swirls, and of course, grunge. Be sure to read the fine-print from the individual download pages, as some require attribution or have a non-commercial license.
Free texture Tuesdays at BittBox
Jay over at Bittbox has just announced that he will be giving away five high resolution textures (3,000 x 2,000 pixels) every Tuesday of the year, absolutely free! The first series of textures is available for download now in the Freebies section at Bittbox. Don’t forget to check back every Tuesday for the next series of images.
Finding and using Flickr images for free
Blog posts and Web pages look better with images, this is a fact. But where can you find images to use that don’t cost a lot? You could turn to some of the free stock photo sites out there. Some are pretty decent, but most of the images have a distinct “stock photography” look about them. Instead, try using images from Flickr.
Photo by Spoon Monkey @ Flickr
Before you say “the images on Flickr are copyrighted, so they can’t be used for commercial work,” think again. Flickr offers thousands of great images under the Creative Commons, allowing you to use them absolutely free, with little more than a photo credit in some cases. 
Flickr offers non-copyright images in the form of several different licenses under the Creative Commons. The type of license the photographer chose to license the image under determines what restrictions you’ll have in using the images. Typically, these restrictions are limited to commercial vs. non-commercial, photo credits, and re-distribution.
Attribution license is your friend
The best Creative Commons license you can choose is the Attribution License. Images that fall under the Attribution License allow you to freely crop and alter the image, and use it any way you see fit for free, just as long as you credit the photographer. Generally speaking, you’ll know you’re looking at Attribution License images when you see one of the two icons above on the page.
Photo by Hyunlab @ Flickr
You can make your search for Attribution License images easier by starting on the Flickr Attribution License page. As I said earlier, there are several different kinds of Creative Commons licenses. The Attribution License is definitely the most flexible, but there are others that allow you to use Flickr images with more restrictions. For more info on the other available licensed images, visit the Flickr Creative Commons page.