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Links and Resources

This section contains some suggestions for supporting software, image sources, books, and some great online galleries.

FTP Utilities

FTP is used to squirt web pages and images up to the web server. Some packages include FTP functionality, but is often handy to have a stand-alone utility, especially as they are usually free or extremely cheap.

AceFTP 3 - Free!

Filezilla - A powerful but free utility.

FTP Commander - Simple, no frills, and free.

SmartFTP - Free for non-commercial work.

Whisper FTP Surfer - Free well-featured FTP client.

Scanning software

The software that manufacturers supply with their scanners is often woefully inadequate in terms of usability. Image quality can also usually be improved by the use of a third-party scanning package.

Photocopier - Not strictly within the remit of the Frame Room, but fun nonetheless. This package simply turns your scanner, PC, and printer into a photocopier. Simply click on the green COPY button!

Silverfast - There is a collection of Silverfast software produced by Lasersoft Imaging Inc. including a well respected range of scanning pagages to bring out the best from your scanner.

Vuescan - An excellent, well established, and very versatile scanning package.

Joiners

Software that merges a number of images together to create one large image. Typically used to create panoramic photos.

Iceland Panorama

This partially completed panorama made up from four photos illustrates the process. Some work still needs to be done with blending and cropping. The software used for this particular image was Photomerge, which comes with Adobe PhotoShop Elements.

Other joiners include PTGui, AutoStitch, and The Panorama Factory. The software that is packaged with digital cameras and scanners often includes a photo merging facility, such as Canon's Photostitch.

Hugin is an easy to use cross-platform panoramic imaging toolchain based on Panorama Tools.

Whilst not strictly a joiner, AndreaMosaic is interesting freeware software that creates a mosaic from a large number of individual images.

If you are after big prints that stretch beyond the limits of your A4 or A3 printer, have a look at PosteRazor, which will quickly and easily chop your images up into printer-sized sized chunks, which can be assembled to form a poster of theoretically unlimited size. PosteRazor is free, and available for Windows and Mac. A complementary application is Rasterbator, which uses dots to generate the image, similar to the way newspaper photos are generated.

Image sources

A number of sites offer photos with clear copyright information. The best of these include:

bigphoto.com - Offers free use of all photos, though if it is for commercial use a credit or link is required.

Fotosearch Stock Photography - Fotosearch Stock Photography is a commercial site that enables searchs through millions of images from 150 of the top photography publishers at one site. Browsing through the archive is free, and there are no access charges, registration requirements, or usage limits. It is a great source for reference, entertainment, and inspiration.

FreeImages - Some good stock photos. Condition of use requires a link or credit.

Morguefile - Classy, comprehensive, and well catalogued image archive.

PD Photo - Free public domain photo database. A lot of good landscapes and some quirky collections - there were 63 pictures of cheese last time I visited.

Public Domain Pictures - Large free-ish selection of images.

Stockvault.net - Some free photos for use in personal and educational design projects.

stock.xchng - Huge gallery of quality photos.

Camera control software

Often called tethered shooting, this is not that relevent to Canon DSLR owners, as the software to control the camera from a PC or laptop usually comes for free in the box. Sony cameras (certainly the A700 and A900) also come with remote camera control software. If you have a Nikon, and do not want to spend a significant amount of money on Camera Control Pro, try the following.

DCamCapture - Free german software for Windows that can control Nikon D40, D40x, D60, D80, D90, D5000, D200, D300, D300s, D700, D3, and D3x cameras.

Sofortbild - Control your Nikon from your Mac computer.

TetherPro - A commercial offering for Nikon users. Around $50.

Other utilities

Resources that do not fit comfortably elsewhere.

Easy Duplicate Finder and Duplicate Photo Finder - Two free utilities for finding duplicate files and images on your PC.

EXIF Date Changer - Changes the date stored within a jpeg file's EXIF data.

ExposurePlot - Reads the EXIF data from a collection of jpeg files and produces graphs of the lens focal lengths, shutter speeds, apertures, etc. Freeware.

Instant JPEG from Raw - Strips out the low-resolution jpeg image from raw files.

The Photographer's Ephemeris - Tool to help with the planning of all types of outdoor photography, but particularly landscape and urban scenes. Includes such things as:

- Time and direction of sunrise and sunset
- Time and direction of moonrise and moonset
- Phase of the moon and % illumination
- Times of civil, nautical and astronomical twilight
- Graphical display on a map

Versions for Windows, Mac and Linux as well as for iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch.

Qimage - Software that optimises images for printing, and makes printing multiple images on a single sheet easy.

Raw Therapee - A useful conversion utility that takes most types of raw files and converts them to a standard format, for example tiff. Particularly handy if you have an editor that does not recognise your raw file type (or just raw files). Free, but they would appeciate a donation if you find it useful.

Smush.it - This uses image format specific non-lossy image optimisation tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality. You'll get a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip for download.

Stereo Photo Maker - A stereo image editor and viewer.

TinEye - A reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.

Watermark Factory - Allows you to create a picture or text watermark in an image.

Galleries

Here are some first-rate examples of Internet photo galleries.

Other Links

The "Miscellaneous" section.

Digital Camera Resource Page - Reviews of what seems to be every single digital camera.

dpBestflow - A guide for every aspect of digital imaging technology from the American Society of Media Photographers.

Digital Imaging Help - A useful collection of links from various sources covering a number of digital imaging subjects. Recommended by one of Sarah's photography students.

Dubtastic's Flickr Photostream is a very useful source of Photoshop frames and textures.

Herrick Photo's Posing Guide - Useful guide to posing individuals and couples.

Photoshop Road Map - Comprehensive and free set of tutorials covering the basics as well as more advanced Photoshop techniques.

Rob Galbraith - Digital photography insights, and loads of useful links.

Table Top Studio - Useful technique guide to product photography and photographing small things in general.