by Jorge Parra
Allow this 100 plus pages, from Creative Lab @ Google, to load both images and videos, and take the time to explore them, to find out how the world and all the rules are changing. This is just heart-stopping and life-changing. Go HERE!
[by Peter Krogh]
If you need to get the maximum run time out of a battery charge on your Mac laptop, you’l want to be aware what is running in the background. If I have a long airplane flight, for instance, it can be annoying to run out of battery while I’m still in the air. You can open the Activity Monitor and check what’s running. One of the surprising culprits – the Finder. If you have your view options set to “Calculate all sizes”, anytime a finder window is open the computer is constantly recalculating the size of all files.
You can either close all finder windows, or uncheck “calculate all sizes” and get up to 30% more run time from the laptop.
Peter Krogh, author, The DAM Book, Digital Asset Management for Photographers
Second Edition May, 2009. www.theDAMbook.com
[by Jay Kinghorn]
Despite the recent dustup between Flash Video and HTML 5, the majority of online video today is delivered in the Flash Video (FLV) format.
To get the best video quality at the smallest file size, be sure to check out Robert Reinhardt’s Flash Video Bitrate Calculator. Not only does it help you determine which sizes and settings are optimal for use in your video compression software, but it also allows you to download your settings for use in Sorenson Squeeze and On2Flix software.
[by Judy Herrmann]
Ratings and rankings – the star and colored label system supported by many image browser and catalog applications – give photographers a powerful way to organize images without a lot of effort.
Most of us already apply stars and/or labels as we’re culling through our captures to segregate the selects from the rejects. You can make this process even more valuable by deciding on a meaning for each rating and label and applying it consistently.
For example, our studio uses 3 stars to indicate images selected by a client. As a result, we can find all of the images that a client has ever picked by simply searching our catalog for 3 star images. Since we don’t deliver Raw or PSD files, limiting the search to 3 star plus TIF or JPG gets us everything we’ve ever delivered. Adding in the clients name as a search criteria, returns only the files selected by and delivered to that particular client.
The key here isn’t what we’ve chosen to make 3 stars mean – you can assign any meaning to the stars and the bars that makes sense for your needs. The key is using that meaning consistently so your three star images from 10 years ago have the same significance as the ones 10 years from now.
Already have a bunch of randomly rated and ranked images? Don’t stress. Just pick a date and implement your new consistent system moving forward. That way, you’ll know what any images rated and ranked after that date mean. If you decide you want to bring legacy images into alignment, don’t feel like it has to be perfect overnight. You can re-rank and re-label images organically, as need arises.
By doing nothing more than setting 3 stars and Tif as our search parameters, we can exclude everything but files delivered to clients.
Judy Herrmann has taught seminars on digital photography since 1995 and is a presenter for ASMP’s dpBestflow program, I Need A Workflow That Works For Me.
[by Jay Kinghorn]
For most photographers, their Web site is their #1 marketing tool. As a result, your Web site should be compatible with as wide an audience as possible. Increasingly, this includes mobile devices like the iPhone, Droid and iPad.
To make sure your Web site is mobile-friendly, follow these few simple rules:
Make it quick. Avoid long animations and optimize images to improve download speed on slower connections.
Resources:
- iPhone WebDev: http://www.iphonewebdev.com Forums, FAQ’s and tips for optimizing or developing sites for the iPhone.
- SiteCatalyst NetAverages: Free subscription with purchase of Adobe CreativeSuite CS5, aggregates data from Omniture’s web analytics customers to show trends for desktop and mobile browsers
- iPhone/iPad Simulator: Register for the free iPhone SDK to download the iPhone/iPad simulator application to test your site. (Or, save the 2GB download by asking your friends to test your site for you and send screengrabs.)
