Now that I'm in the final stages of readying my website (YAY!), I've been working a lot with photos in order to enter my products into the site.
I'll come clean right now and tell you that I'm no Annie Leibowitz. And my photo-editing skills also leave a lot to be desired. I've heard about all the wonderful things you can do with Photshop, but since it was too complicated for me to even draw a straight line with, all those great features didn't help one bit.
That's why I get really excited about anything I find that makes the job a little bit easier.
Even after reading Photoshop For Dummies, I still didn't know a layer from a mask. The book seemed very confusing to me, and it didn't feel as though the topics were organized into any kind of logical order.
I still haven't found a book that I'm happy with, but I did find an excellent Photoshop tutorial in what seemed to be a most unlikely place, About.com. The content is written so that it is easily understood by the graphics software novice, and the articles are filled with photographs illustrating the techniques covered.
There are also some Photoshop tutorials and plugins available at Developing Webs.net. DW does a nice job of explaining the menus and the uses of the tools in their "get to know Photoshop" articles, but I found some of the other tutorials hard to follow. In addition, the lessons are each based on a sample image that you are asked to download and work on. I'm sure they're safe downloads, but I don't like cluttering up my hard drive with 'stuff'.
A wonderful piece of software that I found, and a great timesaver, is the Quick Web Photo Resizer from DZSoftware. It uses a simple drag and drop interface to resize your photos, either to one of their preset sizes or to a size that you specify. And best of all, I can drag a whole folder of pictures to the target window and resize them all in one shot. I've done up to 75 at a time so far, and the software handled it very quickly. DZSoftware offers a 30 free trial, after which the program is just $24. Well worth it, in my opinion. This program is definitely one of those "how did I live without it" things.
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