If you are building a website, you may be feeling overwhelmed about what to do; but if you want to build it correctly, you should assess your needs and what you want the site to be and do for you. Making a list of what you need and want will help, but you should also make a list of what you can, invest both financially and in terms of time, and what you want the site to do for you and your clients. Once you have these things in place, building your site will be easy.

Know Your Direction

Just like any endeavour you undertake in life, you need to know your goal. With a business it’s easy to say that goal is to make money, but you probably have other goals in mind, too. If you are selling a product to inspire people or a service that will help the environment, these are also goals for you. You are planning to change the world or lives, so you need to include that in the direction or your business plan. Making money should never be the only goal a business has or else your business won’t have much substance.

Know Your Design Needs

Once you have that direction you will know what your site needs to look like. This is another reason why “making money” shouldn’t be the only goal of your business because it’s hard to narrow down a design simply for money-making. If you are selling cloth diapers, for example, and they save people money and help the environment, you may want to consider using green colors in your design since you’re promoting a “green” product. If you are helping people with inspirational materials, put pictures and quotes or music on your site that will uplift people, and be sure to change them often so people don’t get bored with them. There are many web templates out there that can make your design easy to accomplish. (more…)

There’s many of you asking is there any solution to create reflection effect in Photoshop like some apps for smartphones does. Well, of course there is, and it is a super easy, so you can add such a reflection to your photos for depth and some complexity. Furthermore once you learn how to make photo reflection effect in Photoshop you will realize that is way better looking then generic apps does.

Creating this effect looks really hard at first glance, but, as I said above, it really isn’t, once you learn few steps. This technique works particularly well on certain images, especially if you are looking for a HDR look. I’m going to show you how to create a reflection, and retains maximum flexibility for post processing image, so you can choose any color background you want, or if you want to put some text on it. (more…)

Christmas is for many most beautiful holiday. During Christmas season everybody wants to be happy, to share the love with dearest and to make sweet Christmas decorations. It’s a best part of the year when especially designers can share their creativity and make wonderful Christmas designed elements and pictures.

Because of that we are sharing 5 top Christmas designed wallpapers with you for next Christmas season. Hopefully you will like them. You can use them as desktop wallpaper or you can use them to decorate your website for Christmas holidays.

All of the wallpapers are shared for free on best Christmas wallpaper site Free Christmas Wallpapers:

1. Christmas Winter HD Lights
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The story of Gaming has seen some interesting milestones in history. Its evolution is both exciting and eclectic. One of history’s most enigmatic general’s, Napoleon, loved the game of Blackjack, while fiction’s most commercial commodity, James Bond, has often been associated with Baccarat. This and more facts are available on Gaming Club’s informative and artistically appealing info graphic which traces the important dates in the progression of one of mankind’s oldest , fun and at times very enriching past times, all of which are now found on online casino (more…)

With such a wide range of post-production editing software now on the market, available for desktop computers, tablets and smartphones, more photographers are looking to enhance the quality of their images after uploading them.

However, the number of features available on programmes like Adobe Photoshop can be overwhelming, meaning it can be easy to either miss useful functions or go overboard, leaving none of the original quality of the image intact.

Here, we explore a few editing options that will tweak rather than transform your work, so that your images are the best they can be. Most professionals are not afraid to admit that they retouch their photos, so don’t feel guilty about doing so yourself.

Enhancing colours

Novice photographers and image editors alike are prone to falling into the trap of adding a black and white filter to every image. However, greyscale doesn’t necessarily equate to artistic, and you should be careful about over-using this type of edit.

Instead, utilise the functionality of post-production software to get the best out of the colours in your photograph. One of the best places to start is with the white balance, as this has a significant impact on the mood an image portrays.

It’s best to get the white balance settings right on your camera prior to making the shot, but you can make adjustments later if the result is not quite right. Changing the balance can help to correct, or enrich if desired, the ‘warmer’ red-whites or the ‘cooler’ blue-whites.

You can also adjust the saturation or hue of different colours through most editing software. This allows you to give a deeper orange glow to a sunset, or even to change the shade of a flower in the background. Experiment with the sliders to find out what works well.

Brightness and contrast

Changing these settings post-production allows you to give life back to photographs that are dull, or to give extra definition to highlights and shadows in an image. Making adaptations means you can make a photo ‘pop’ more, or correct those taken in bad lighting.

Improve sharpness and reduce noise

You can reduce noise – to digital cameras what film grain was to analogues – easily in most editing programmes. It can help to give your image a more ‘smooth’ finish, but it is crucial to avoid overdoing it, as this can compromise the detail of your image.

Increasing the sharpness of an image can help to give more texture to it, a useful function when this is an aspect of the subject you want to highlight. It will also result in more defined edges, which can be beneficial if photos are slightly out of focus.

Creating a focal point

Photographs where the focal point is not sufficiently highlighted will not have the desired impact on a viewer, but post-production edits can help to make different parts of a photograph ‘pop’ to give a more eye-catching result.

If the aperture setting was not optimal at the time of shooting, you can change the depth of field in most software to draw more attention to something in the foreground. You can further enhance your subject with colour and sharpness adjustments.

There are other ways to better draw a viewer’s eye to a focal point using editing tricks – simply using the crop tool to get rid of distracting aspects of the photo can make a huge difference. You can also use selection tools to boost the colour or detail in a particular part of an image.

This article was written on behalf of Jessops, a specialist retailer of photography equipment.

Before perhaps less than a year ago it was almost impossible to imagine a graphic designer to create on tablet, but with the help of great applications these days we can see more and more designers performs their work on android tablet.

Android OS is now the most popular in the world, and a tablet may be the perfect place to create new applications, with whom you can certainly earn some money through the Play Store.

Tablets are all over the place, and while Apple’s iPad get the most media attention, there’s no lack of outstanding Android alternatives to select from.

Here are our top Android tablets for this summer, especially if you are into the graphics design. All of the tablets are very capable and very powerful, so not only they are ideal for home users, but also for enterprise users as well. With these tablets you will have a superb Android experience, and alongside with the right apps you will a get a lot of work done when you’re absent from your working table. (more…)

Despite being able to design a clean, easy to navigate, fully functional web pages in the blink of an eye, you’d be surprised how many web designers’ desks are awash with scrap paper, empty coffee cups and the last 15 editions of .Net magazine. But what exactly are the essentials for a web designer’s office space? Here are our top four must-haves to get your web designers’ desk in order:

iMac

Boasting a huge 27” screen, the iMac is vastly preferred over the popular ‘dual screen’ option many office workers face nowadays. With a 2.8GHz i7 processor, 12GB of RAM and 1TB hard drive, this piece of kit from Apple is a force to be reckoned with. It is able to handle multiple programs at once – from Dreamweaver to Photoshop – so you’re in safe hands.

Trackball Mouse

When some people see more than two buttons on a mouse they panic, but not web designers! Any device that helps you navigate the screen quicker and easier is seen as a lifesaver, but we’re the first to admit that using your thumb on the trackball can take a bit of getting used to.
If you suffer from wrist pain or repetitive strain injury, a trackball mouse is ideal – especially if you choose the wireless version.

USB Keyboard

Although the iMac comes with a mini wireless keyboard, it can be costly to keep replacing the batteries and its reduced size means you miss the arrow keys and the number pad that was scrapped from its design. Although the ‘wireless’ sounded like a good idea in theory, no one really needs to use their keyboard more than a few inches from their monitor, especially if they’re working from an office desk.
Apple is no longer manufacturing the wired keyboard but this doesn’t mean other tech retailers aren’t. There are a wide number of larger USB keyboards on the market which include the number and arrow keys in their designs. Although certain retailers, such as Selfridges, still stock the original Apple wired keyboards. (more…)

Before we get into this adventure, I want to explain in a few words the meaning of X-Pro LOMO title. LOMO is a Russian company that produces optics and cameras, and the term Lomography in professional photography world mean wide-angle, distorted colors, expired film kind of photo aesthetic. So, you get that rustic and yet modern kind of photography. It’s very popular these days, especially because of many apps for smartphones camera. One of the main stone of hipster culture is lomography, so if you want to go with the flow this is the must tutorial.

So, I explain the meaning of term Lomography, but there’s also an x-pro term, which is kind of cross processing, a very unique technique in modern photography. Basically it means that you are using chemicals for one kind of film which is meant for another kind. And the term is not that modern as one can assume. Many photographers back in the days use slide film and than I they had luck develop that same film in the normal film lab. So that’s way we call it cross processing. (more…)