Resources
As a designer, stock photography is your lifeblood. Finding clients these days that have a decent photography budget is difficult to say the least. There are plenty of low-cost stock photo sites out there, but even then it can be like pulling teeth getting a client to pay for photos. Thankfully there are plenty of free stock photo sites like those listed below.
Adobe InDesign
There are lots of ways to build a contact sheet of a folder full of images. Despite what many people think, you can still use Adobe Bridge, but it requires downloading and installing an older add-on. Instead, you can use Adobe InDesign’s built-in ImageCatalog script to build thumbnails of a folder full of images, including the file name, image dimensions, and more.
Read more “Building the ultimate contact sheet using InDesign”
Resources
I’m always on the lookout for stock photography resources, and I tend to bookmark any stock photo site that shows any potential. But let’s be honest, client budgets aren’t what they used to be. Sites like Getty and Masterfile are just too expensive. At the other end, ThinkStock, Shutterstock and iStockPhoto are affordable but have a rather poor selection of images for high-end advertising use; they’re overloaded with cliché images with poor cropping and mediocre subject matter.
Enter Stocksy, a curated royalty free stock photo site run by the photographers themselves. By curated I mean that you can’t simply submit photos for inclusion on the site like you can at other sites. You have to be invited by the photographers that run the site. This ensures high-quality images, not high volume. Read more “Stocksy: A better stock photography resource”
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe has announced that current Photoshop.com storage and sharing accounts will move to the new Adobe Revel service starting April 2, 2013. The migration will be automatic.
Adobe Revel is a sort of mix of Apple’s old .Mac photo album feature and iPhoto. It stores your photos in the cloud, keeps them synced with all your devices, builds photo albums for viewing by friends, and offers minimal editing features.
Adobe Revel offers a free tier with limited uploading, and a premium tier that offers unlimited uploading and storage for $6.00 per month.
Resources
Media Militia is offering a pack of 20 different paint tossing images, some with a white background and some with a black. If you do not like the paint colors, just open the document in of Photoshop, add a new layer and fill it with the color you want. Then change the layer blending mode to Color.
Apple | Mac
iPhone users have plenty of apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic to apply effects to their images before sharing them. Those apps are all the rage right now, and for good reason. They give you the ability to turn a mediocre photo into a personal masterpiece. For the most part though, Mac users who prefer to shoot photos with dedicated digital cameras had been left out in the cold until Lo-Fi came along.Lo-Fi brings retro camera effects to your digital photos in a fun and user-friendly application that looks more like the back of a digital camera than it does a desktop application. Lo-Fi doesn’t really do anything that you couldn’t do with a copy of Photoshop and some spare time – except that it does them with the click of a button, at a fraction of the cost, and with fantastic results!
After launching Lo-Fi, you simply drag a photo into the large viewer window to get started. That’s when the fun starts. On the right side, you’ll find three rows of options to enhance your photos; Film, Mood, and Frame. Read more “Lo-Fi for Mac brings retro camera effects to your images”
Resources
Resources
Enter the era of affordable stock, and user-contributed photo sites. With digital camera prices reaching all-time lows, and the quality more than adequate, the average person can provide some very good shots. There are now hundreds of sites on the web that offer fantastic photography for little to no cost.
I’ve put together a brief list of some of my favorites below, check them all out. Read more “Affordable stock photography for designers”
Resources
Smashing Magazine is offering a handful of free Christmas theme images for download. You can grab them here.
Adobe InDesign
Adobe InDesign CS4 quietly added an enormously useful feature which allows you to link one folder full of images to another, including linking from one file to another with the same name, but a different file type extension. If you’re like most creatives, you probably build your initial layouts with comp images from Crestock, Getty or your favorite stock photo site. These comp images are typically low-res .jpg images. Once the layout is approved, you probably do a little retouching and manipulation to the images and save them as a .psd or .tif for output. This requires you to relink each image to the new file. And if those new high-res images aren’t in the same folder, it becomes even more tedious. 
If you’re using InDesign CS4, visit the flyout menu in the Links panel and select Relink to Folder… Here you can specify another folder on your drive to find the new images, and even tell it to link to the new .psd or .tif file. The best part is, you can have it relink an entire folder full of images at once. Nice! I hadn’t seen this feature mentioned anywhere, until this blog post at InDesign Secrets. Many thanks to them for sharing it!
General
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.
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.
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.
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.