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Creating your company logo

Designing a logo can be difficult.

Making one can be simple. Getting the company to agree on one is another ball game entirely. Making sure you plan ahead and design a range of logos will make the process easier and will allow the users of the logo to come to a conclusion sooner.

When making a logo I generally browse numerous logo showcases for inspiration, looking at their shapes and colours.

Once I’m happy with the logo, I’ll spend a number of hours to variate the colours and fonts offering a range of choice making the selection process easier and to gain better feedback from the end user.

Keeping your shots in focus

Just when you think you have the perfect photo in your cameras viewfinder, you later copy the image on to your computer to find the picture is blurry and unusable.

To remedy this, either use a flash making sure you take precautions to remove effects such as red eye or invest in a tripod to make sure your pictures are taken with no shakey camera syndrome.

Another tip is to make use of sharpen tools which exist on most photo editing software.

When you are happy with a photo, simply run a sharp filter through the image. This technique puts more emphasis on the edges in your image reducing the effect of blur.

Adding frames to your images

Often, on popular image sharing sites such as flickr and picassa, you will notice a significant amount of people frame their photos, either with a thick white or thick black border.

To do this, use a popular photo editing software program, such as Photoshop or even Microsofts new Paint.

If you create a new layer and fill the photo in either a white or black colour, simple use a marquee tool to select a square area resembling the space inside your frame and choose cut. If your frame layer is above your photo, you will notice that a frame has now been correctly put on the photo.

In my opnion, this effect highlights the photo itself, and draws more attention to it’s detail.

Have fun!

Understanding Image Licensing

Most people are unaware they are breaking copyright laws when they take an image from the web and use it on there own websites for financial gain.

When you take an image from a source, you must be sure you understand what license they are under. If you can’t find an image license attached, the chances are the image is copyrighted, thus meaning you cannot use the image without consent and possible credit from the author.

Most websites such as flickr and stock photo websites will demonstrate the license next to the picture. If an image is royalty free, the chances are this is then fine for you to use and edit unless there are any additional instructions supplied by the author.

Creating a simple frame for your pictures in Photoshop

Have you wonder how to create a nice looking little frame for your pictures in Photoshop while making some nice wallpapers? It’s definitely easy and will help photographers that would like to spruce up their picture collections.

First open the Photoshop and load your picture. Resize it however it fits you and create a new document for your wallpaper, let’s say 800×600 px. Then convert the background to the layer using right click menu in the layer panel. Select the whole picture you’ve opened before (Ctrl+A) and copy it to the new document.

Place it in the relevant place and create a rectangular shape beneath it, which would be around 5-10px bigger than the original picture. Now go to blending options and follow this guide:

Drop shadow:

• Opacity: 30%;
• Distance: 0px;
• Spread: 0%;
• Size: 5px;

Stroke:

• Opacity: 10%;
• Width: 1px;
• Colour: black (#000000);
• Position: Outside;

Hope this helps!

Best ways to improve your skills in image editing

Besides from practise there are a large number of other ways to further your skills in image work.

The first is free and one of the better ways to get straight into the more advanced stuff. It is simply reading through tutorials. There are many websites such as ImageDiff that produce a large varying amount of tutorials and guides to improve yourself.

Another are books. Although books off places such as Amazon aren’t free, the quality of the material is generally going to be higher and more detailed than that of a tutorial found from the web. If the book has good reviews and is fairly lengthy then this is a great way to get better at what you are doing. You could always try a library!

Images for the web

What makes a photograph you’ve taken different from the many images on a website?

The answer is mainly size related, and not visual size, but size in memory.

When a website loads it has to download all the imagery on a website, the small the image sizes in memory, the less time it takes for the website to load the faster the experience will be for your visitors.

One general rule of thumb is to try and get the image size down to it’s furthest before you can notice any loss in image quality.

Photoshops Save-for-web feature is perfect for carrying out this task. Try using JPEG quality 6 or 60 depending on which interface you are using.

Where to upload your images

Now that you have pain stakingly created your images and photographs where can you upload them to share to the world?

There are a well known services that you can use that are all free, some of them include:

• Flickr
• Picassa
• Imageshack
• PhotoBucket

As was said above, all these services are free and offer different levels of service.

My recommendation is Flickr, simple because of the features and how it is very widespread. For example picking an application up on your iPhone or Android phone is very easy and can let you manage your photos on the move.

Considerations when taking your Photos

Before taking a photograph have you considered the following?

• Lighting
• Camera angle
• Focus
• Exposure

If you haven’t, it’s well worth researching into what makes a great photo. Everyone can use a camera and get a good shot, but only few can get a great shot.

Using the correct lightning and getting the perfect angle can add a lot of depth and more interest to a photo making it stand out amongst others.

With most skills, this comes with practise, however in time and with a lot of research I’m sure a great photographer will emerge in you.

Correcting the colors of your photo in 3 easy steps

Due to bad lighting or odd weather you can sometimes find the colors of your photos are dull or are slightly off.

Luckil,y many photo editing software packages can easily correct such problems.

If you are using Photoshop, load your image and then go to the Image menu.

From here you will be able to Auto-Tone, which as suggested correctly adjusts the tone of the picture automatically using other elements of the picture as reference.

The next step is auto-contrast which will adjust the contrast and brightness to the best of it’s ability.

Lastly, auto-color will try to correct and inconsistencies with color oftenly making the picture look closer to real life.

If these tools don’t correct any issues, try manually adjusting the tone / contrast / color.