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.

Although I only stumbled upon it recently, 500px isn’t a new site: it’s been around since 2003, if its About page is to be believed. Yet, it looks and behaves like a thoroughly modern and attractive site.

That’s partly because the whole site is created in HTML5 (or “handmade using ecologically sustainable code”, according to the witty slogan at the foot of the site). That means it not only works well on desktop browsers, but also on tablets – even the iPad.

The site is working on an official iPad app, but it also publishes its own APIs, so third-party developers can produce their own 500px-based apps, such as the excellent ISO 500 for the iPhone.

500px has two features that, for me, set it apart from Flickr. The first is the Editors’ Choice, which, as the name suggests, is a curated pick of the best photography on the site.  The quality of photography on display here is awesome — and somewhat intimidating for an enthusiastic amateur like me.

The second is the free photo Portfolio that is available to any signed-up member of the site.  There is a range of classy themes to choose from – I’ve opted for the Minimal Pitch Black –  which look stunning in the default full-screen view, and works equally well on the desktop as it does on touchscreens.

You also get a dedicated URL based on your username (in my case http://bazzacollins.500px.com) so that you can easily point people towards your work, as well as the option to fill in Biography and Contact details.  You can even publish a free blog via the site. For photography enthusiasts – and potentially even professionals – 500px could spare you from the hassle of setting up your own website. More designs, custom URLs and Google analytics are available to users who sign up for a $50 a year premium account.

There are a couple of things to watch for on 500px. As with Flickr, the photo uploader can be erratic, especially with larger files  – which partly explains why my own portfolio is currently so slim. The “Popular” section of the site – the photos that have earned the most reader votes – is also top heavy with portraits of naked women, so you might want to untick the Show Nude tickbox at the top if you’re viewing the site at work.

But with a thriving community (three million unique users last month), stunning design and plenty of free tools for photographers, I think my long search for a Flickr successor is finally over.

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.

The image below is a good example of a shot that needs work. Through the viewfinder, the car looked bold and striking, and juxtaposed nicely against the sky. On screen, though, the image is lifeless and hazy.

The simplest tool in your arsenal is the Levels control. In the GIMP it’s under Tools | Colour Tools | Levels, while Photoshop Elements users will find it under Enhance | Adjust Lighting | Levels…, or by pressing CTRL+L. What you’re presented with is a histogram of the current image. At the left-hand side is 0 – i.e. black – and at the right is 255 – i.e. white. The graph in the middle is your image’s tonal range. So, if you have a tall peak on the right-hand side of the histogram, your image is very bright, and vice versa if your graph is mountainous towards the left.

The trouble is that plenty of images don’t utilise the full tonal range available, so nowhere on the image – or not very much – is either pure white or pure black, and your image lacks contrast.

The histogram in Photoshop Elements for our image looks like this:

The problem isn’t immediately clear: the image makes reasonable use of most of the tonal range, but a lot of it is spread thinly along the left-hand side, which is why our shot lacks punch and looks washy.

A useful rule of thumb with the Levels tool is to drag the black and white point sliders towards the middle, until they touch the edges of the histogram. This means the lightest point in your image will be pure white, and the darkest point black. This will increase the contrast in your image. Here’s our original image on the left, contrasted against our final image on the right. The difference is subtle (which is the point, after all), but the right-hand image is more interesting to look at, and because we’ve only dragged the image sliders to the edge of the histogram, our image still has all the detail it had when we pressed the shutter release.

The image is much better, but to finish it off we’ll employ the Curves tool. In the GIMP this can be found under Colours | Curves, and Enhance | Adjust Color | Adjust Color Curves in Photoshop Elements.

The resultant dialog boxes look like this in the GIMP and Photoshop Elements respectively.

Understanding the curves dialog box is simple. The horizontal axis represents the tones currently in your image. Again, dark tones are on the left, light tones on the right. The vertical axis is your output tones. Click on the diagonal line and you take a tone on the horizontal axis and convert it into a tone on the vertical axis. Click OK and your changes are applied to the image. For instance, click on the diagonal line near the top and drag it down, and you’ll make light tones darker.

The classic rule of thumb is to create an S-shape with your tone curve. This increases the contrast in your image dramatically.

And here’s what happens if we apply the above S-curve to our image of a car.

The result is far more striking. We’ve deepened the redness of the car without deepening all the tones in the image and creating a murky, under-exposed effect. The only caveat is to be careful. Heavily-saturated, punchy images work well on screen (you need only look at Flickr to see their popularity), but once printed they can be a little overwhelming, which isn’t what you’re after if you’re trying to produce something to mount on the wall.

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.

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.