Moo

I recently signed up with Flickr because I wanted a more professional looking photo host than Photobucket. Now I've had many happy years with photobucket but it will always remain a budget web host. Flickr however is much more than that. It has many different group which you can join (such as a group for photos of Yorkshire etc) and each group can have a forum. I love the way people can comment on your photos as well. So overall I think it has much better functions than the likes of Photobucket and Webshots. I've not even looked at other hosts such as Picassa. So who knows they might be just as good.

Anyway when I signed up to Flickr I was taken to a page run by a company called Moo. Moo (if you don't know them) produce some nifty little business cards and things from your photos. As a new user to Flickr I was entitled to 10 free cards from Moo. I only had a few naff photos in my account at that time but decided to just sent off for the 10 free cards anyway. I was pretty unimpressed with the idea to be honest. But was actually quite impressed when I saw the cards though I'm sure that with better photos they would of been much much better. If you were wanting to give business cards out then this is a uniques, interesting and relatively low budget way to do it. Should the day come that I ever need any business cards then Moo will be high up on my list of places to check out.

Watermarks and the watermark debate

There seems to be many differing opinions on the use of watermarks in photography. Some say they like to include them to prevent people using the photo and calling it there own work and some people like to use it to say where a particular photo came from (what website etc). But they can be ugly and distracting and it doesn't take a genius to figure out how to remove it. For better looking results some people say to put the watermark on the fram of the image and keep it small or better still leave it out all together. I'll leave it to you to decide what to do. At the moment I have some kind of copyright prevention in that I only post medium sized low resolution images so they'd be hard to reproduce at any usable size anyway.

You can buy programs such as iWatermark to create watermarks but you can also create them in Paint Shop Pro. Here's how....

1. Select the text tool and click on the image where you want to place the text.
2. In the text entry dialog, type the copyright symbol or any other text you want to use for a watermark.
3. Still in the text entry dialog, highlight the text by dragging across it and set the font, text size and formatting as desired.
4. With the text still highlighted, click the color swatch and set the text color to 50% gray (RGB values 128-128-128).
5. Still in the text entry dialog, make sure create as vector is selected, then click OK to place the text.
6. Scale and position the text if necessary.
7. After positioning the text go to Layers > Convert to Raster. You will not be able to edit the text after this step.
8. Go to Image > Effects > Inner Bevel.
9. In the inner bevel options, set the Bevel to the second choice, width=2, smoothness=30, depth=15, ambience=0, shininess=10, light color=white, angle=315, intensity=50, elevation=30.
10. Click OK to apply the inner bevel.
11. Go to Layers > Properties and set the Blend Mode to Hard Light.