Category Archives: tutorials

What makes a good photo

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A good photo is not about the equipment you have. There are many great shots taken on a Box Brownie. It is about composition, aesthetics, perception and the use of light.

There is now a fantastic site which talks about the basics of photography. It is called Photo Tips

Kodak has composed the tutorials. There are rules to photography from taking shots of babies to what you are going to sell on ebay to something you might one day publish. All the basics of good composition and lighting are on this site.

Having a good photo editor is also probably necessary these days. Now, Photoshop and Paint shop pro are the best, but they cost. I have a list of free graphic editors on oz web hub. But here are a couple of new ones, also free.

PhotoPad is one of them. It has an attractive interface and does what most people want when it comes to photo editing. It crops, straightens and corrects colour and removes red-eye.

Photoscape is another. It’s not as good looking as Photo Pad but it functions just like it. It does a few extra things too. There’s a back lighting effect and a ‘bloom’ feature making for glam portraits.

There is another application which does only one thing. ShiftN straightens converging verticals. There’s no preview in this app but if all you want to do is correct that photo you have of the Empire State building, then it’s for you.

Happy learning!

How to use Bravenet hosting

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Bravenet started out as a very small company offering tons of free scripts and tools. They must have made money to employ more people through their ads. Now they are both a site with a huge number of free web master tools and they have just gone into hosting, as you will see on the right of this post.

I am thinking of some of you from blogger.com. Both the blogger and word press platforms are free but wordpress.org requires you to be self hosted. I’d have to say that this allows for far more flexibilty. I have to admit that when I look at a blogger site, I think this is not as professional as it could be, even though I have one myself on Tennis

You would be able to use your hosted word press for other things too like an ordinary web site and forum.

Now Bravenet has just posted how to upload to your host (them). Here is what they say:

So you have created your website and are ready to put it on the internet for the whole world to see. Not sure how to do this? Then keep reading!

Here at Bravenet we provide you with a few different ways to get your website online: file manager, FTP Java Applet and FTP.

Bravenet File Manager – File Upload

If you have large number of files to upload I suggest trying one of the other two methods below. The ‘Upload File’ link found in the top right of your file manager comes in handy when you only have a few files to upload. By all means you can upload as many files as you want – it just may take some time.

After you log into Bravenet, select your website and click file manager and you are now in the root of your website (root being: yourwebsite.com or yourwebsite.bravehost.com). If you were to upload your file from here it would be placed in your root – yourwebsite.com/yourfile.html or yourwebsite.bravehost.com/yourfile.html.

If you wish to put your file into a new folder you can click the ‘Make Directory’ link. Next, name your folder and it will then appear in your file list. If you click that folder (to go into it) and then upload a file it will upload into that folder (yourwebsite.com/yourfolder/yourfile.html or yourwebsite.bravehost.com/yourfolder/yourfile.html).

file manager

By default there are four upload boxes in the ‘File Upload’ window; you can add more by clicking the ‘new file upload box’ button. And then upload your files by clicking ‘uploading files.’

In the Bravenet File Manager you can also edit, rename and delete files. This comes in very handy if you just want to make a small change or delete a single file.

Bravenet Java FTP Applet

You can connect to the FTP Applet from a few different places. The easiest is to click the ‘ftp’ tab at the top and then click the icon under the title ‘FTP Applet.’ If you have more than one FTP account simply select the one you wish to use. The FTP Applet always starts by asking you for your password. Once it has loaded, double click the ‘web’ folder. You will then be provided with a list of your website(s) – select the website you wish to upload to by double clicking.

ftp applet

On the left side you will see a pane that says ‘Your Computer’. There you can browse through all of the files currently on your computer. To the right there is another pane called ‘Web Server’ (your website).

To upload a file to your site:

  1. Find the file(s) that you wish to upload on your computer by using the ‘Your Computer’ pane.
  2. If you want to upload the file(s) to a certain location on your website (ie. a folder called images) make sure you have opened that folder by doubling clicking it in your ‘Web Server’ pane.
  3. Select the file(s) (click to highlight them).
  4. Click on the upload arrow (arrow pointing to the right).

You can upload more than one file at a time by holding down your shift key. You can also upload an entire folder by just clicking the folder name – the FTP Applet will upload the folder and everything in it. To create a new folder you can click the ‘New Folder’ icon in the top right of your ‘Web Server’ pane.

FTP

You can also connect to Bravenet with any third party FTP program of your choice. You can obtain all your FTP information under the ‘ftp’ tab. You will need to know your username (it is different than your Bravenet one, so double check!), your password and your server/hostname. Again this is found on your ‘ftp’ tab after logging into Bravenet. How and where you enter this information is going to depend on the program you have chosen. Most FTP programs behave similarly to our Java FTP Applet.

If you are having problems with FTP I suggest checking our knowledge base or Jenny’s tutorial on FTP for help. Because there are so many FTP programs out there and they all vary it is impossible to give you instructions for every program. Check the program itself or program website for any help files if you are having troubles getting connected.

Recommendations: More than 8 files, or files that are more than 10 MB, use the FTP applet. More than 100 files (for example a complicated PHP application), or more than 100MB use a 3rd party FTP program.

Of course if you use wordpress for hosting you would not need to use FTP.

Using Adjust Color for Skin Tone in Photoshop Elements

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Using Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 again, here is how you can automatically adjust the skin tone of a person in a photo. This photo is of me taken with flash after a 40 degree day and after finally getting into the air conditioned Rod Laver Arena at the Australian Open tennis at a night session. Obviously I’m not looking my best.

Awful shot of me

By the way I have used the TNT screen capture to take that screen shot. I think it’s worth buying.

Anyway, my face is pale.

So I can go to Enhance> Adjust Color> Adjust Color for Skin Tone and click on the face.  You can do that automatically, or use the sliders to do it manually.

Jenny Campbell
You can now see the difference in skin tone. Hey I don’t think I’m a purist anymore about photos, but I’m sorry to have to inflict that awful photo as a demonstration on you.

Screen capture utility

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I downloaded a 30 day trial of the TNT screen capture utility. It is great! Much better than anything else out there for free.

Here’s what it can do

· Capture anything and everything
· Editing tools and graphical object
· XP screenshots with rounded corners
· Smooth resizing – no jaggy edges
· Capture mouse pointer with shadow
· Drop shadows, transparency and more
· Screenshots with irregular shapes
· Just click for default Windows colors
· Thumbnail function
· E-mail your screenshots
· Simple and intuitive user interface

So useful for tutorials!

Using the Magic Extractor

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If you only want to edit photos, Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 is probably your best bet. It is much cheaper than Photoshop and has almost as many features, if not a few more to do with photos, albums, printing, collages etc.

I bought a magazine the other day called ” Photoshop Elements Essentials” and it had a 30 day trial of Photoshop Elements 6. Included were a number of tutorials which you may also be able to get at Lynda.com

I just checked this and you cannot access the free tutorials. But you can get them from Learning Photoshop Elements.

Today, I tried the Extractor tool. I’d been trying this on Photoshop without much luck.

Choose a photo which would look even better if only one feature was highlighted onto a white background instead of the background you currently have, like sport shot.

Sam practising

This is a shot from an Australian Open Tennis championship which I took.

Now to extract just an image of Sam,

1. Select Image> Magic Extractor
2. It took a while to do this and I didn’t get a perfect result, but you use the Foreground Brush to select Sam and the Background Brush to select the background. Cover as much of both areas as you can. Then go to Preview. Photoshop Elements will extract the image for you.
3. If you are not happy with the results you can use the Point Eraser Tool.
Result

Use magnetic lasso tool to highlight sections in photos

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Personally I am a bit of a purist when it comes to photos, but recently I’ve had photos rejected from the sites I upload to and I’ve realized that everyone is photoshopping their photos now.

Here is a tutorial on highlighting a section of the photo and making the rest decolourized. This may work for say a fruit tree, where you want to highlight the strong colour of the fruit, but not the tree.

I started with a sample picture from Photoshop 7. As you will see there is no particular reason to alter this image, but I am using it as a demonstration.

I am wanting to highlight one of the balloons and leave the rest desaturated.

1. Open Photoshop and open the image you want to work with

2. Duplicate your photo and work on the copy

3. Select the magnetic lasso tool.

4. Set it like this: Feather, 0; width, 10 pixels; Edge Contrast, 10%; Frequency, 57. Tick anti-alias. You should already be in New selection mode.

5. Go to Edit>Preferences>Display & Cursors and in the Other Cursors select Precise and OK.

6. Zoom in if need be.

7. Left-click on the part of the photo you wish to highlight for the coloured part. Trace around the edge carefully and left click again exactly where you began. You will see little dots all around the item.

8. Go to Select> Inverse. Now you will see everything selected except the item.

9. Go to Image> Adjust>Desaturate.

10. Deselect and save.

Here is the finished product.

After

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Professional Web 2.0 Design style makes your website perfect by Joanna Gadel

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This is a free article from Go articles

You must acknowledge the author and include any links within the article

As we all know that creative website designing arena increases rapidly, the competition between affordable web design professionals gets enormously. Thus they are putting their total effort or you can say entirely strength into their designed websites, that these websites can easily catch the concentration of the market audience. Nowadays web designers are vastly using web 2.0 design style due to various logical reasons. Previously web designers depending on web 1.0 method and nowadays those site are get ranked into almost all search engines and thus they receive popularity too. But what about those new site who are not reputed as them? The only way to get noticed by their viewers is their professional looks.

People are thinking about effective contents but recently an exclusive small business web design can boost your traffic ranking with its simplicity, matured looks, elegant features that delivers more with less do. Here we discussed some elegancies of web 2 styles over previous web designing styles.

Exclusive Logos

Recently logos play a different role in traffic ranking of your. If you have exclusive logos at your website and your site known by search engines then traffic gaining chances are automatically increased for your site. A web 2 design style provides fabulous logos that have been larger in size and tinted, effectual visual impact, integrating the trade name icon, attitude and ready to grab the concentration of viewers.

Superior Text Fonts

A web 2 design allows you to highlight the important parts of your web content by frequently putting bigger text fonts into the content. This is also a recognized way to put visual effect into your content to catch the viewer attention when they traveling through your site.

Image Representation

Some times graphical representation is much worthy for any site. People are just using normal texts to optimize them but this modern web designing style offers you bold text introduction into the background of that image to make more significance to the look. It conveys an effectual message for that site and swells the pleasant feelings of any visitors.

Innermost Layout and Pretty Icons

Innermost layout or you can say central outline and nice looking icons are added features of this professional web design style. Using web 2 design it is really easy to maintain the Innermost layout of any website. These days appealing icons are very common requirement of elegant web designing due to catching relevant internet surfer attention.

Lesser Columns

Previously it is viewed that sometimes 4 to 6 columns are used for different purpose or needs of any sites. But recently, using web 2 designs, you can easily construct your web page within 2 to 3 fulfilling all above requirements. With lesser columns; you can display your information more clearly in a smart manner.

Reflections and Effects

Sometimes a website looks cleaner with its own reflections, it looks effortless and rich at a simple go. In web 2 designing you can increase the clarity or qualitative feelings of your website by using the inner-glows, drop shadows, infusing color reflections, 3D affects etc.

Highlighting Top Importance

In a web 2 design, you are able to highlight top important parts or you can say most important sections by using fluorescent color blocks. It can easily put viewers into your targeted portion of your web page.

Clear Navigations

Navigation part of your website should be very clear from the visitor point of view. Clearly defined big and bold links with specified color and also tone and shape separately from the other part of your web page content will be the out look for all web designers.

Effortlessness

The one and only purpose in choosing web 2 design style is to design any website effortlessly. This design style provides us superb quality web templates with sophisticated simplicity. An eye soothing clean and simple design will easily catch any visitor concentration apart from other web templates.

When first impression will created for a particular website, viewers are automatically read all sections properly and try to rest on them for long time. Thus for fulfilling the business goal, a simple accessible web design can increase the traffic through a worthy manner.

Infuse Brilliant Colors

Infusing colors into a site is always a difficult task for any web designer colors plays a vital role in snatching the attention of any kind of web traffic. In this designing style web designers are playing with sophisticated influential colors to get noticed by their targeted traffic. In recent days infused colors can make a tremendous impact apart from using any kind of solid web content.

About the Author

Joanna Gadel is from a reputed Sydney web site design firm in Australia and her writing on web 2.0 design style is just terrific in illuminating the technical knowledge that today’s small business web deign should have.

Customising your word press blog

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This is my own video. Before embedding any You tube video, make sure you go to Users>Profile>unclick Visual editor.

You can now see You tube videos in a larger format
http://youtube.com/warp_speed

How to upgrade your word press blog

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I’m no expert on this but I did read the advice on the word press forums. Firstly they suggest you should back up all of your blog. Now if your server has a back up feature that would be great. But my server used to have a back up service and now no longer does, so I downloaded all my files via FTP to my hard disk. Takes ages.

There is a back up plugin available from word press.

I then uploaded the latest word press version 2.3.3 and followed the install instructions only to find that there were errors and there was nothing on my page. I forgot to upload a  theme, although there is always a default theme in word press.

So I went on a few forums and found out about this .htaccess file which you can’t access on FTP but you can on your server’s file manager. I didn’t delete this file the second time round, even though by then I had backed up my posts manually by copying and pasting.

I tried again. I deleted all my files, except .htaccess from my server’s file manager and it took a second rather than hours. I uploaded the new version of word press and although there were errors (I don’t know why) it worked. I uploaded the new compatible theme and all the posts were still there. No need to copy and paste every post.

But there was much to do. All the plugins disappeared. I uploaded those I wanted and some worked and some didn’t. My new theme has tags and I had to go back and add those in. Some images were still there but others weren’t and my ability to upload pictures had disappeared, so I tried uploading to wp-content/uploads. Still no success. I found out one has to make writable ‘wp-content’ and ‘uploads’ and then it worked. So I had to go back and upload my images.

My widgets were still there. Don’t ask my why.

My You tube video embeds had distorted the format again so I had to re-insert them. To do this I followed my own instructions

All the categories were still there too.

Now someone tells me that in a few days version 2.5 will be released from word press. This time though it will be much easier so I thought I’d share my experience.

The other thing to be mindful of is that although themes usually work on upgrades of word press, some plugins won’t. There is a bit of a lag between the developers of plugins and word press.

Any php file you have altered in the past will have to be redone, so I had to add my Feedflare code and my navigation code again.

If you had a better experience that can make it all a lot easier, it would be terrific to hear from you. Although my blog is working, I still do not understand why or what I should have done.

How to add navigation tabs to a Cutline word press blog

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Every new user of cutline’s word press theme wants to know how to add the navigation tabs at the top for ‘About’ ‘Archives’ and ‘Sitemap’ pages. This may occur for other themes also, but I haven’t checked as I use cutline. The Cutline forum seems a bit slow in answering this question AND the answer is difficult to find.

So how do we do it?

1. Go to Write>Write page. For the About page write up something about you. Also on the right hand column you should see Post Slug. ‘About’ should already appear there as it is all in the theme. Publish this post.

2. Do the same for Archives, but you won’t need to write anything there as the archives will come up automatically.

3. Do the same for Sitemap except you won’t need to write anything there either. The sitemap will occur without you doing anything.

4. I also like to have Contact at the top of my blog in the navigation. For this you will need a Contact plugin which you will activate, but you will have to make a page called Contact too.

Now your Archives and About pages should be appearing at the top automatically because cutline has that added into its theme.

What about Sitemap and Contact?

You will have to change the PHP. Do not panic! Go to Presentation>Theme Editor and look for the file called Header. This is the php file where I found the navigation links.

headerphp.jpg

It will say, down the bottom, If this file were writable you could edit it.

So we have to make that file writable. Go to your FTP software. Look at the right hand side of your FTP as these are the host server files. Find this file (header.php) under wp_content/themes and right click on it. To make it writable you simply click on every box.

Go back to your dashboard on word press. Go to Presentation>Theme editor> find header.php again. At the bottom you should now see “Update”

Go back to image I have shown you. You will see a list there of what is in your navigation tabs. Copy that code identically or copy and paste, and change the code to reflect that it is Sitemap and Contact. ‘About’ and ‘Archives’ should already be there.

Update the file. Bingo!

I still have to learn how to add any more tabs in the navigation, but at least I am freed up in terms of being able to change things on any of the php files. I have added my feedburner code to the main template. To be honest I don’t know if this is what produced the links like email this at the bottom of each post or not or whether that occured because I signed up for Feed Flare at the same time.