Free Helpers

[FAR148]

Fellow Fence Checkers,
Share your Free knowledge. Post your Free Helpers that you have found online and that help you with your photos, work load and or research etc...

Here's some that I use and find helpful.

Gallery Wizard
Gallery Wizard is a template based program for creating thumbnail gallery pages. It accepts over a dozen different input formats, with the possibilty for creating galleries from several different folders at once. It renders the gallery pages, thumbnails including various effects (like 3D Border), and can optionaly also create HTML pages for each image. By using easy to understand HTML template files with various variables, you can create thumbnail galleries that suit your existing site design.

http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Web_Authoring/Misc__Web_Authoring_Tools/Gallery_Wizard.html


ReNamer
ReNamer is a small, yet very flexible file renaming tool, that offers all the standard renaming procedures, including prefixes, suffixes, replacements, case changes, as well as remove contents of brackets, add number sequences, change file extensions, etc. For advanced users, there is a PascalScript rule, which let users program their very own renaming rule. The program allows you to combine multiple renaming actions as a rule set, applying each action in logical sequence, which can be saved, loaded and managed within the program. In addition, ReNamer supports Meta Tags, such as: ID3v1, ID3v2, EXIF, OLE, AVI, Hashing and more; has an ability to rename folders, can process Regular Expressions, and supports Unicode filenames.

http://www.den4b.com/downloads.php?project=ReNamer

Google Earth
Want to know more about a specific location? Dive right in -- Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips.
Great for looking at Airport layouts as well as runway orientation.

http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html

Picasa
Another good one from Google, It's not Photoshop, but it can help in a pitch.
Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organized.

http://picasa.google.com/download/index.html

Answers.com
A wonderful Reseach site, Answers.com.
The world's greatest encylodictionalmanaeapedia. 
http://www.answers.com/

Photobucket.com
Photobucket provides free video and photo sharing. Easily host and link your images and videos to social networks and message boards. Photobucket is reliable and very easy to use.

http://photobucket.com/

This should be a cool topic.
Steven L

[Dave O'Brien]

Steven, thanks for the renamer tool, came in very handy 

[FAR148]

Hi Fence Checkers,
Here's some more Free helpers, web site related this time. If you have a web site and want to add a logo and have it
appear in the address bar of your visitors. Here's how you do it.

First, you have to create a logo for your site; a very tiny logo to be specific.
The size of the logo should be 16 x 16 pixels and it should be saved as a Windows
icon file(a .ICO file) To save as a .ICO use Photoshop plugins below. 16 x 16 is such a small canvas area, it can be very difficult to be creative. Start your logo with a canvas size of 64 x 64, then when you are happy with your logo resize down to 16 X 16.

You will need this Photoshop plugins.

Windows users look here
http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/files/ICOFormat-1.6f9-win.zip

Mac user look here
http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/files/ICOFormat-1.6f9.sit

CS2/mac users look here
http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/files/ICOFormat_cs2-1.6f9.sit

Unzip it and copy and paste it into the "File Formats" folder inside your Photoshop
Plugins folder.Then Quit and relaunch Photoshop. Now you can save your new web logo
as a .ICO file.

Next you have to upload your new logo icon to your site's webspace or where you upload
images and or file that is on your web site.

Now, copy the following code and paste in the HEAD section of your home page,
replacing "yourwebsiteaddress" with your domain name and replacing "favicon" with
the name of your .ICO file :

<HEAD>
<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="http://www.yourwebsiteaddress.com/favicon.ico">
</HEAD>

It took me about half an hour to do mine. 
Cheers,
Steven L

[A. Dijksterhuis]

It took me about half an hour to do mine. 

And it works...  Thanks for the info.

Arjan

[Jason-Fight2FlyPhoto]

Great topic Steven, and thanks for that last little tidbit... I'm trying it right now.


Here is a service for those of you who may be interested in a very simple way to sell your prints to customers online... check out www.photoreflect.com.  They have a FREE web version available and really is a pretty handy service!  I've sold several prints now and the customers were very happy.  One thing that is particularly nice about it is the fact you can hand-select which labs print your photos so you can make the choice by location, or products offered.  For an example of what this service looks like, check out mine at http://fight2flyphoto.photoreflect.com

That's all I've got for right now.

[CAVU Mark]

Irfanview is also a good browser.  I used it for a while till I stepped up with some $ for other programs.
http://www.irfanview.com/   Don't ask me what it means.

[FAR148]

Fellow Fence Checkers,
Banner sizes, links to personal web site as well as lengthy signature is a growing issue here at Fence Check. Here's a way to kill two birds with one stone.
Clickable signature banners. Here's mine and how to make your banner clickable.



 Most of us have a signature banner of some sort and a link to our personal site and or galleries. But how to link the banner to your site and or galleries?   First off, if you do not have on, go and make one in Photoshop. Make it 468x60. Can be a tiff, gif, bitmap, most are Jpegs. Now you got to upload it somewhere on the web. Photobucket, Flickr, smugmug..... where ever you choose, you need the URL link of your banner.  http/photobucket/yourcoolbanner.jpeg. And you also need the address of your web site and or the address of your galleries.
www. yourcoolwebsite .com
 
Here is the code you need to make your banner clickable. Copy and paste your web address and your banner image into the code below.

[**url=Your web address here][**img]Your banner image here[**/img][**/url]

!!!!!!  ** is used as filler, so you can view the code. Once you have copied and pasted your info into the code, remove all the **!!!!!!

It should look like this
[**url=http://www.far148.com/][**img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v61/far148/Farphotography07banner.jpg[**/img][**/url]

Once you have removed all the **, again copy and paste it into the Signature box in Profile/Modify Profile/Forum Profile Information.

Steven L

[skippyscage]

oi Steven! you have 2 banners in your post 

<sorry> 

[Rob W.]

Hey Steven,

Thanks for the help!   

Cheers,
Rob

[FAR148]

Fellow Fence Checkers,
Time to look at EXIF Viewers. What is EXIF? EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format. This is a format used by most digital cameras store additional information about the camera settings inside the image file. This is information such as aperture, exposure time, ISO setting, exposure mode, flash usage, focal length and a lot of other more or less interesting data. EXIF viewer is capable of reading EXIF information embedded in photos as well as little thumbnail. Some EXIF viewer also displays the image histogram. And why is this important? Knowing your camera settings when reviewing your images is a powerful tool in learning good technique. You can see what lens you were using and at what focal length, what priority you were shooting in, your shutter speed, you aperture value. Yet another benefit of digital photography, instant verification. My sister always hated having to record all her setting during a shoot and than wait for her film to be developed to see what worked and what did not or even worst was it even the right notes for that roll of film! 

Here's a few I like.

ExifPro Image Viewer - I really like this one, can evaluate for free and is fully functional. can buy for $20

http://www.exifpro.com/downloads/187_ExifPro_Install.zip

TTNview - a very simple EXIF information viewer

http://myalpha.dls.net/ttnview/ttnview.exe

Opanda IExif - it freeware but it work.

http://www.qwerks.com/download/8321/IExif_2.26_en.exe

another good one is Canon's file Viewer utility.
Comes free with any purchase is a EOS body.

Steven L 

[Scotty G]

Great thread, guys. Thanks.

[FAR148]

Fellow Fence Checkers,
Histograms. What are they and how is understanding them going to help? 
" Once you become proficient at “reading” a histogram you’ll be able to almost instantly evaluate the quality of the exposure that the camera is making"

No amount of Photoshop can cure a poorly exposured image. Yeah, it can help if your image is underexposured but if your image is overexposured...... 
Knowing and understanding exposure is critical.

Here's an article from "luminous landscape" that may shed some light on things.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/understanding-histograms.shtml

Steven L

[Sagar Pathak]

Great thread!  I use the Opanda exif and love it!

Thanks!

[FAR148]

Fellow Fence Checkers,
In photography, a lens hood is a device used on the end of a lens to block the sun or other light source in order to prevent glare and lens flare.

They're wonderful things and I try to use them as much as possilbe. But what if you lost or damage your len hood and need a quick fix?   
Try a Printable lens hoods.

http://www.lenshoods.co.uk/

I would not take one to a high end photo shoot but around the house, at the park maybe even static displays at an airshow... what not! The hoods are PDF's and must be printed @ 100%. All the popular len makers Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Sigma, Tamron and Tokina.

It is strongly recommended that you print onto strong card, as ordinary paper is too flimsy to be used as a lens hood. Dark grey card offers the best performance, as it reflects less light internally. Black card will be even better, although it may be difficult to follow the guide lines when cutting out your lens hood. You can secure the lens hood to the lens using a rubber band.

Steven L

[JClark]

Thanks for the all of the info posted in this thread!