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Posts Tagged ‘ flickr ’
500px – the site to finally topple Flickr
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
Yahoo hasn’t got much right over the past decade, but one of the best decisions it made was to buy the photo-sharing site Flickr. Alas, like many of the other once-excellent services in its portfolio, Yahoo has allowed Flickr to stagnate to the point where the only reason to keep using the site is the size and talent of its user community.
The Flickr homepage looks like its designers went on strike in 2003, its uploading facilities are basic and it simply doesn’t display your photos in their best light.
For months I’ve been looking for an alternative to Flickr, and at last I think I’ve found it: 500px.
How to add punch to your digital photos with the Levels and Curves tools
Thursday, March 19th, 2009
A common complaint from new DSLR owners is that their cameras leave their images looking rather dull and washed out: not like the punchy, eye-catching images they used to get from their cheaper compact camera.
The complaint isn’t baseless. Most DSLRs, by default, do less in-camera processing than compacts; the assumption being that you’d rather start with as exact a replica of reality as possible and edit it later.
Still, there’s little worse than a perfectly-composed, perfectly-exposed image that nonetheless doesn’t look as exciting as you thought it would. The answer is to get to grips with the Levels and Curves tools. The good news is that virtually every photo editor includes these, from Photoshop and Lightroom, to Photoshop Elements, and even free applications such as the GIMP.
Photoshop rivals – one real, one fake
Friday, November 7th, 2008
Photoshop’s had more than a few imitators over the years, but I’ve never before seen one that was made from real world materials! It was beautifully constructed as part of an advertising campaign for an Indonesian firm called software-asli.com – you can see how it was made here on Flickr.
Coincidentally, I also stumbled across this browser-based Photoshop equivalent today:
It’s called Pixlr and though it’s not about to surpass Photoshop CS4 in terms of power and features, it’s more than competent for applying quick fixes and touch-ups to digital photos. It’s impressively fast too – much faster, in fact, than Adobe’s own online editor at Photoshop.com and it doesn’t demand that you fill in any annoying registration forms. You just rock up and use it.
I’m particularly fond of Pixlr’s Old Photo filter. Let me know how you get on with it on the comments below.
Flickr adds 3,000,000,000th image
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
The three billionth image has just been uploaded to Flickr – that’s an astonishing nine zeroes.
I’ve helped to contribute several hundred of those myself, although only the most recent 200 are shown, as I’m too tight to pay for a professional account. I wonder how many of those 3 billion images can actually be viewed?
Luckily, the 3 billionth image is rather tasteful; a moody, monochrome snap of a doorway. The 2 billionth image, uploaded almost a year ago to the day, is also rather artistic; a gnarled tree stump shot from below against a startling blue sky. I’m not suggesting that foul play is afoot, although it is quite lucky, isn’t it?
As if to prove that nothing is being manipulated, I can’t find any reference to the one billionth image. One presumes it’s horribly pornographic, violent or, even worse – among the Flickr community at least – poorly shot. Perhaps the subject of the image is just too horrible for Flickr to have promoted, such as this one.
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