If you’re a designer, you know there are licensing hassles involved with using certain photographs in your commercial designs. To avoid this trouble, you can go with stock photos. These are photographs that are meant to be used freely in your brochures, sites, and other design work. A downside to this is, stock photos can be pretty expensive. Luckily, there are still sites out there that offer some great ones for free. And here they are:
I use Photoshop for all my graphical work- I am self taught, so I’m always experimenting with differnet settings and features. Photoshop is a massive piece of software, with many bells & whistles- so you forget how to change the setting back at times when you’ve messed around with it. That is when I use the following command. It resets Photoshop back to factory settings.
Hold CTRL + ALT + SHIFT buttons (Windows) | Command+Option+Shift (Mac)
Now, while keeping the buttons pressed, launch Photoshop by double-clicking your shortcut with your mouse
As Photoshop begins to load, you will get a prompt asking you if you would like to “delete the
Photoshop
settings file”– simply click “Yes”
Adobe is the standard in the digital design, and illustration industry. They are also moving into the audio and video sector with Adobe Premiere, and Soundbooth. One problem, they are very expensive. A struggling artist will have a lot of trouble affording it- luckily there are some great alternatives out there for free. Here are my favorites:
Gimp is a very popular alternative to Photoshop. It has a very different interface when compared to Photoshop, but is able to perform pretty much the same tasks. It is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. http://www.gimp.org/
An amazing photo editing software for Windows (XP, Vista). It has won many awards such as PC World Best Freebies 2007, the Webuser Gold Award, Cnet 5 Star review, and more.
I’ll let the following quotes review it for you:
PDFCreator allows you to create PDF documents from any Windows application that support printing. After installed, it will get added to your set of installed printers as a virtual printer. When the virtual printer is selected, for example in Word, it will output the document as a PDF file, and allow you to save it anywhere you want. Very handy for professionals.
A true light weight champion. This application is so light, yet so feature rick, you will never go back to Adobe Reader again!
Download: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/downloads/
Here is another gem from “Smashing Magazine“. Over 40 modern and clean design fonts. Design is everything these days, everything needs to be measured by the pixel, fonts kept consistent, and unneccesary crap stripped out. A site I use as a template for my designs is http://www.apple.com . It does a great job of staying minimal, and also appealing to the eye. Ok, I’m getting off topic here- enjoy the fonts!
I love Smashing Magazine, but never stumbled onto this one. It is the motherload of custom shapes for Photoshop. It has skulls, splatters, retro circles, logos, and just about everything!
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