The WCC Weekly Roundup

Came across a pretty cool website this week… Its called MakeUseOf. Its basically a bit of a geeky website with all sort of resources. For instance, every week they release a pdf guide on a range of different topics. These are all for free. All you have to do is go to their facebook page, and ‘like’ it. This will allow you to download their guides.

There’s a few that relate to us: “The Essential guide to Digital Photography” and “An idiot’s guide to Photoshop” (part 1 & 2). Lot of other topics covered in their guides.

The two Photoshop one’s are pretty good. They have stuff on resizing, cropping, saving for the web, sharpening, making images black and white and lots more stuff…

PetaPixel had a post where a user (Paul Little) used HDR software to create what he calls “HDR Mixes”. Normally when you use HDR software you will use a couple of photos with different exposures. In this case they use totally different photos and merge them together using the HDR process to create some interesting results as you can see above. Give it a try to create some contemporary entries?? (BTW, PetaPixel has really good videos every day.)

Lastly, every month judges complain about images that could use some editing (levels, etc, etc.) . Processing photos on a computer is really not an option but a necessity. If you don’t have Photoshop, I would highly recommend investing in something like Photoshop Elements. Photoshop Elements basically has all the Photoshop functions that pertain to editing photos and is under R1000 from places like Incredible Connection.

There are free options available. The best one I know about is Gimp. Over the next couple of weeks I would like to cover some common and useful techniques for photo editing using Gimp. For today you can Download Gimp (for windows) or the Mac Version and have a look through some of their documentation and tutorials. If you need any help getting it installed then leave a comment and I’ll try help you…

That’s it for this week… See you at the Rally if you there!