Frameroom clouds

Links and Resources

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

HTML Editors

These are not strictly necessary for image gallery creation, but can be very handy for tweaking web pages, and just generally seeing what is going on. They can also be used for downloading web pages or even entire sites for inspirational purposes (however, I should point out that copying/plagarising/stealing is usually illegal).

The daddy is Adobe Dreamweaver. Originally developed by Macromedia it is a very slick product with every feature imaginable, tight integration with other Adobe products (such as Flash and Fireworks), and a large professional user-base. There are also a lot of support material and other resources available. However it has a very steep learning curve coupled with a very steep price. If you would like to have a go, Adobe offer trial downloads. Dreamweaver runs on Mac as well as Windows platforms.

Adobe GoLive aspires to the Dreamweaver crown, and may be the prefered choice if good integration with Photoshop or Acrobat is a high priority. It offers a similar range of features to Dreamweaver, but with a different look and feel, and like Dreamweaver it is also expensive. As with most Adobe products, it can be trialled via a download. Runs on Mac and Windows.

One I like is the CoffeCup HTML Editor. It is a commercial product, and a very capable one, but it has a slightly bonkers outlook on life (checkout the “No way” and  “Cool” buttons). It is also less than a quarter the price of Dreamweaver, and you get free updates for life as well. It can be downloaded for a free trial.

Nvu is a free, well-featured product that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editing. Nvu is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.

For those on a budget an option is Mozilla Composer, available as part of the Mozilla browser package for Windows, Linux, or Mac. A useful tool, and free!


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-comercial work.

Whisper FTP Surfer - Free well-featured FTP client.

WS_FTP - Not expensive and a quality product with encryption and other advanced features.


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.

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

If you are looking for an image for a project there are obvious places to look on the Internet, for example flickr, Google Images, or Yahoo Image Search. However, due to optimisation for display the image quality can be indifferent, and importantly the copyright status may not be known.

A number of sites do 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.

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.

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

stock.xchng - Huge gallery of quality photos.

Yotophoto - Free-to-use photos and images.


Other utilities

Resources that do not fit comfortably elsewhere.

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

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

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

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.


Further Reading

An excellent and up to date introduction to HTML is Elizabeth Castro’s HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS. I’ve used this book a lot, and as well as giving a good grounding in the basic principles, it also has a great deal of useful reference material. It even details more arcane subjects such as WML and gives a very clear introduction to cascading style sheets. Highly recommended for beginners, but useful to all skill levels. Elizabeth Castro also has on-line support and updates for the book.

As an alternative (or complement) to Elizabeth Castro’s book, Teach Yourself HTML and XHTML in 24 Hours by Dick Oliver and Michael Morrison is well worth considering. It follows the familiar Sams approach of 24 one hour sessions, with tests and exercises at the end of each part. A very good book, particularly for those new to this technology. A readable book with a laid-back style that is not too technical, a good reference section, and a supporting web site containing examples and more resources. Recommended.

For anyone starting out with Linux I would unreservedly recommend books by Christopher Negus, such as Red Hat Linux Bible - Fedora and Enterprise Edition. He tends to produce hefty volumes containing practically everything you need to set up and maintain a Linux workstation or server. This particular book has over a thousand pages written in a very readable style, and also three CD-ROMs.


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.

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


 

 

 

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