Entropy

While animated gifs are all but dead and buried (though personally I’d rather see them than a damned image map), don’t discard them altogether as they can be an easy way to make a (very) cross-platform, easy to display video file.

Obviously this tip is not for reencoding your wedding into an image and mailing it to you aunts on 56K - but if you have a small clip this works great - LH link to Ubuntu Forums finally to The 4 Steps Guide on Making Animated GIFs from Videos. Oh, and its all free!

A.viary.com has an awesome article comparing its product to FotoFlexer, Splashup, Picnik and Adobe Photoshop Express.

The biggest difference between Phoenix and the other online editors I tried was that Phoenix was created with the serious artist in mind whereas the others seemed to be geared more towards the casual user, the user who needs a quick image crop/photo processing for web.

And in that regard, applications such as Fotoflexer and Picnik, do excel.

Of course, Phoenix still allows for minor image enhancement features and cropping as in the other programs, but the depth of the features in Phoenix and potential to create in-depth composite art puts it in a separate class more akin to desktop software. Aviary’s unparalleled collaboration system, rights management and built-in storage gives the user added incentive to use the program over its desktop predecessors.

I also came across an article stating that 60% of Photoshop users are pirates. That is an insanely high amount of people pirating Adobe’s software. I would think that the majority of users pirating it are using it for basic tasks and hopefully with the release of the online version these figures will come down.

Source: WikipediaAdobe has launched a cutdown (essentially basic) version of Photoshop online. Enjoy the various quick features you may use now without the hassle of installing Photoshop; or acquiring it (illegally which is never wise) or for many dollars.

Adobe today launched a basic version of Adobe Photoshop available for free online. Photoshop Express will be completely Web-based so consumers can use it with any type of computer, operating system and browser. According to Yahoo! News, Adobe says providing Photoshop Express for free is part marketing and part a strategy to create up-sell opportunities. It hopes some customers will move from it to boxed software like its $99 Photoshop Elements or to a subscription-based version of Express that’s in the works.”

Related articles

• Adobe Puts Free Photoshop Online [via Zemanta]
• Adobe Makes Photoshop ‘Lite’ Available for Free [via Zemanta]
• Adobe Launches Hosted Services With Photoshop Express [via Zemanta]

LH, the source of all good, is reporting on EpicEdits weblog post on how to create Photoshop Actions. If you don’t know, actions are automated tasks which can make Photoshop life less tedious, almost like macros.

“Photoshop actions are the best — they save time and make you more productive during post-processing. They can be used to speed up repetitive tasks, make quick work of time consuming edits, and give you a little creative inspiration. In several of my previous Photoshop articles I’ve given the option to download a set of actions that cover the topics discussed here on the blog.”

Read more at EpicEdits

A popular post around here is “131 Free Photoshop Layer Styles!“, and so here is a list of great resources for free layer styles for Photoshop - enjoy.

• Free Photoshop Layers (about.com)
• Free Layer Styles (about.com)
• Ultimate Web 2.0 Layer Styles
• Adobe Photoshop Layer Styles (biorust.com)
• 56 Photoshop Layer Styles