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Our Editor comes back from the wilds of the world wide web with a suite of web based content editing tools, a site devoted to the free dissemination of images and more video tutorials than you can shake a mouse at.
http://a.viary.com/blog/phoenix
Get thee to an A.viary
Now here’s a concept: start a terrific website for photo manipulators to compete with each other (www.worth1000.com), then set up a second site loaded with a suite of highly featured web-based content authoring and editing tools. The link shown above will take you to the developer’s blog for the image editing application called Phoenix. It certainly looks impressive, but if you want to have a play you’ll have to ask for an invitation because a.viary is still in beta. Other applications in the suite include the Raven vector editor, Hummingbird 3D modeler, Myna audio editor, Starling video editor, Owl desktop publisher and many more.
http://tv.adobe.com
Learning resource
Adobe, which has long understood the value of video tutorials, has now launched a site called, strangely enough, tv.adobe.com. It is divided into separate channels for the photographer, designer, video professional and developer audiences. Video quality, as you might expect, is slickly professional. The content of the videos I sampled were useful and comprehensible for an amateur like me. A good spot for Adobe product users to check for a little inspiration and advice.
http://commons.wikimedia.org
On the Commons
Wikimedia commons is an interesting variation on the image library concept. Staffed by volunteers, it permits anyone to upload media files (pictures, video, audio, animation, etc) that may be used by others for free. As the welcome page explains: ‘Unlike traditional media repositories Wikimedia Commons is free. Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as the source and the authors are credited and as long as users release their copies/improvements under the same freedom to others.’ Interestingly, there does not seem to be a limit to how much content you can upload – as long as it yours.
http://www.piclens.com
Another pic in the wall
PicLens claims that its free plug-in will transform your browser into a 3D image and video search tool. Hype aside, it is in fact quite a functional mechanism for quickly searching through huge image collections. Maybe that’s why Google/Picasa, Flickr, Yahoo!, Facebook and others have enabled their sites to support it. Well worth a visit to check out the explanatory video.
http://www.resizr.com
Matter of size
How often have you found yourself wishing you could just re-size a picture without having to open your photo editing software? Resizr.com reckons there must be enough of us out there for it to be worth creating a web tool for this apparently narrow purpose. The re-sizing process is straightforward and when you’re finished you can save the picture to your computer, email it, send it to a mobile phone or get code to link to it from a blog or web page. The only annoyance is the ad-heavy nature of the site.
http://tinyurl.com/32j6lc
Top Photoshop tutes
Smashingmagazine.com has collected a long and varied list of links to a vast range of useful video tutorials on everything from Speed Painting (not so much tutorials as dazzling time-lapse movies of illustrators at work), to beauty retouching, matte painting and the ever popular ‘you suck at photoshop’ series. Along with links to specific video tutorials, there are also links to other similar collections (eg, 78 tutorials at Planet Photoshop or 75 episodes of ace digital artist Bert Monroy at Pixelperfect). Well worth a few hours of your time.
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