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Photography is a potent medium. Speaking without words, it has the ability to unleash emotions in a visceral way. Whether it is fine art, photojournalism, or commercial photography, works by brilliant photographers can touch us deeply.

Think of the impact photography has had on journalism. Before the first reproduction of a photograph by the New York Daily Graphic in 1880, the only news pictures were engravings. Seeing real photographs of news events brought an immediacy never before possible. Imagine opening your newspaper for the first time and seeing images of train wrecks, battles, criminals, or the Worlds’ Fair-suddenly, everything once distant seems very real.

Photography is capable of instilling great emotions us. Majestic images such as Ansel Adams’s black and white photographs of Yellowstone and Yosemite awe us. Barren photos like Margaret Bourke White’s study of rural poverty during the Great Depression overwhelm us. Horrific scenes of our nation’s wars sadden. Brutal scenes of injustice anger us. It is not mere clich to say that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Photographs also reach us personally. From the very beginning, people loved having even the smallest daguerreotype of family members to hold. Civil War soldiers carried pictures of their wives and sweethearts close to their hearts, and they left behind stiff pictures of themselves in uniform. Today, we still handle photographs of our loved ones with reverence and enjoy traveling back in time via stacks of family albums.

Most of us “take pictures”. Few, however, have actually taken a course in photography. Studying photography can lead to any number of career opportunities, or it can help you better capture images of the world around you. If you love looking at your surrounding through the eye of a lens, if you love the weight of a good camera in your hands, why not see where that feeling can take you?

There are still those who love to see great results without a price. With photography today, there are many professional level services available but free to use. Just imagine the power of being able to handle any job but convenient and easy enough to use as part of a regular routine. FlauntR is a program available to provide just that, the ability to be a pro without charging yourself the price.

There is a new tool to help you achieve this. Check out a new site called flauntR that provides tons of tools to make your digital photo editing a snap. You can have professional photo design with only a single click so take the time to check out all the things you can do.

Now professional photo designs can be not just affordable, but they can be free. Apply 1000’s of professional photo templates to your photos, in just a single click! Frame your holiday snapshots with a picture postcard or a Polaroid for a nostalgic effect. Set that black and white photo of your parents in a digital antique wooden frame. If its digital scrap booking templates you’re looking for, try the photo compositions. Ecards to wish people well on any occasion and event just choose from 100’s of photo greeting card designs all of which can be customized with photos for that personal touch.

Ever watch your photoshop wizard friend tantalize you with his editing? Get the same photo editing features for free, and beat him to the punch with just a few clicks! All the must have basics when rushing to submit to your boss, or your kids snaps to your mother-in-law - from cut-crop-rotate tools, to basic photo effects like soften/sharpen, image boosting and red eye removal. Adjust exposure and color correct your photos. All the effects used by pro photographers. From adding photo vignettes to get a classic look, or a shade of nostalgia with a posterize and grain effect, to more exotic cross processing effects.

Get more creative with your photos adding custom font text messages, and even any type of shapes, bumper stickers and even costumes onto your photos! Say it all through your photos. Use them to remind relatives of special occasions, or make up with friends you may have lost touch with. Turn photos into incomparably personalized greeting cards, and find custom text fonts to suitable for any message. Finding just the right words and how to express them visually will make for a more touching photo.

Carry your best megapixel photos, in your mobile! From desktop wallpapers to pictures of your pet, custom crop photos to fit your phone. Over 250 phone models are supported! Create personalized mobile wallpapers from desktop size wallpapers and megapixel photos to fit any mobile. Cut the photos as imaginatively as you want, to capture the best parts of your pictures. Get mobile versions of photos that would not have even loaded on the mobile! With just one click! Make wallpapers in seconds!

Capture colors from paintings and photos, and merge the color tones into your own photos, like the Photoshop CS3 color match only faster. Add a rosy glow to everyone’s cheeks with just a click! Experiment with color matching and boost your photo’s appeal with amazing results. Use it to professionally edit your photos and you to can master photography.

Have you ever compared your social network profile photo to your passport photo and found that they look the same and neither one looks like you? Only one click will get your profile photos the way you want them, picture perfect! You finally captured your ‘perfect angle’ with your camera, but your social network only shows you only from the nose down on your profile page. With profilR you can custom crop your social network profile photo, and put your best face forward on display

And there is so much more to flauntR. Hey look it up and give it a try, its fun, its simple and it free.

Many people new to web design are confused by slices and Javascript rollovers and end up abandoning their projects out of frustration. The point of this Photoshop web tutorial is to keep things simple by creating a web page that uses only 2 graphics.

Start off by creating a banner and place it in the top row of a table that will contain 5rows and 1 column. The next row of the table will hold the text for your site along with photos you would like to incorporate into your site. Row 3 will hold a separator, row 4 will contain text links plus a copyright notice, ending with row 5 being a second separator.

For this example we’ll name this site My Site. Now we need to find a graphic for the banner. You can find professional level images at sites such as the iStockPhoto galleries and at only $3 or so for most images they are affordable. Free stock photo sites are also available for perfectly good quality images.

Try to incorporate the colors from the graphic into the colors of the banner. You can choose multiple colors but make sure they work well together or create a variation of the same shade from just one color. Here I will create 3 different shades of blue.

By using the opacity slider on a sampled hue you can create a nice variation. Open a new document and copy and paste the main graphic you’ve selected into it. From the toolbox select the eyedropper tool and sample a color by clicking on it in your graphic. Doing this will change the foreground color square in your toolbox.

With this done, open another new document and in the Background Contents select White and Click OK. With this document open, create a new layer by going Layer> New> Layer. Then go Edit> Fill and select Contents, Use: Foreground Color. This will fill your document with the color you just sampled. A valuable tip is to reduce the opacity with the slider and to basically adjust it until reaching the desired color hue. Once you find one you like, flatten the image by going Layer> Flatten Image. Again use the eyedropper tool, to change the foreground color square in your toolbox only now it will be the same as your newly created color. Click on the color square and the color picker will come up, and you can make note of the numbers of the color you had just created.

I went through my fonts and settled on Onyx regular. When you find a font that works for you, try playing with the tracking, the leading, and the scale - or a combination. It makes it more personal and unique when you include some tweaks.

To select a font in Photoshop go Window> Character. In the palette you will see a list of the installed fonts. Go to Window> Paragraph to pull up the Paragraph palette you will use to create the adjustments to your fonts

Looking for new fonts? At the end of this tutorial you’ll find a list to some free font resources.

Now we’ll create a new document that is 600 x 300 pixels. You of course can change this size to fit your own design when you choose your own stock photo and plan your layout.

Now lets make a new layer by Layer> New Layer and call it Designer Pro. I’ll position the image on this layer and shrink it to fit. You shrink your graphic with Edit> Transform> Scale. The bounding box will have handles. Use the Shift Key to constrain proportions, and shrink your image by selecting the top left handle and pulling towards the bottom right. Drag inside the bounding box to move the graphic. Once it is to your liking, click OK.

Next we want a tinted background. I’m going to go with the light pink.

I select the background layer, Layer 1, and I fill it with the light pink by going Select> All, then Edit> Fill, and in the dialog box in Contents, I select Use: Color and in the Color Picker I enter FBE0EC.

The result is a 600 x 300 banner with a gentle background color and with the art placed on the left. It’s finally starting to look like a real web page now.

I decided to apply a thick stroke to the background layer to make the design more interesting. First make sure the background layer, Layer 1, is active, and create a copy by going Layer> New> Layer Via Copy. Next double-click next to the layer name. This will bring up the Blending Options in the Layers Style dialog box.

Select and then click on the word Stroke in the Styles options on the left side. I changed the settings to Size: 7px, Position: Inside, Blend Mode: Normal, Opacity: 100%, Fill Type: Color, and I clicked the color swatch and entered D04E8C in the color picker. Click OK.

The border is just to balance out the design. Feel free to make changes and get creative with your own ideas.

We’re going to put the names of the major sections right on the banner. These will be the links. Since it will be just one single graphic we will be using image maps.

Create a new layer for your words. Use the type tool to create the section names and then use the move tool to position them exactly to where you want on the banner. Major Note: pick a color for your text that is darker than your background color!!! Otherwise it will either blend in or you won’t be able to see it at all. Do this by going Window> Character. In the Character palette you’ll find a color square that you can click on to change colors.

You’ll need an HTML editor like GoLive or Dreamweaver to automate this process. It’s really very simple. You make little “maps” over each word and then enter the link destination. If you don’t have an HTML editor you’ll need to do a Google search on image maps to find a tutorial, or buy a book like Elizabeth Castro’s HTML Quickstart Guide to help you out.

Create a new document. The width should be 600 pixels, and the height should be about 12 pixels. Fill this with your background color. Then, using the text tool and a dark color, type some periods, like this:……….. and place them in the file, centering them. Change the size and the spacing until it looks perfect. Now save this as a GIF file.

In your HTML editor of choice build a simple table that contains 5 rows and 1 column. If you’re going to use text link navigation below the banner instead of image maps on the banner, create an extra row so you end up with 6 rows in your table. Now place your elements into the individual rows of the table and you’re done.

If you are on deadline and can’t cope with learning any more Photoshop techniques or HTML, here’s another solution. You can buy a ready-made template from Template Monster that you can use as a base to create web pages in Photoshop.

On the front page of Template Monster you’ll find a pulldown menu where you can select options and then carry out a search for a template. The templates are reasonably priced and pretty easy to manage in GoLive or Dreamweaver. In the past I’ve purchased a template solely for the color scheme and the images. On certain projects I found this was less expensive than buying stock photos. Visit Template Monster to see the wide variety of website templates that they offer.

I hope this tutorial will help you create something nice, and I wish your new website a thousand years of good luck!