It is the right time to prepare your Christmas gifts and the coming new year with my photographic prints or my posters (or even the new year’s cards). And it will help me maintain the YLovePhoto web site. But, I want to extend this to a gift for you. You will be able to use the special code that will unlock a special magic voucher:

15% of discount
with the code:

Yves Roumazeilles – The catalog of photos and prints

Métro, collages, déchirures by Yves Roumazeilles	Big cats of Africa by Yves Roumazeilles

RedBubble is an online art gallery and arts community. Browse the growing collection of art at http://www.redbubble.com

photo credit: 005 MARCO

• 1 audience: Be sure that the subject is right for your public (your kids will get all the attention of your parents and in-laws, but not from your office colleagues or friends).
• 1 subject: Don’t cover everything you can and stay concentrated onto only one theme per slide show.
• Be short: It’s always easier said than done, but you must absolutely limit yourself; You will be forced to choose only your BEST pictures, that’s a good thing; I already heard people say that a good slide show should not go over 15 or 20 photos, NEVER do more than 100 images.
• 1 story: To maintain attention, nothing is better than a story to tell or a scenario to follow; Leaving the straight path may be worth another slide show… another time.
• 1 music score: Do not select more than 1 musical style (If you want more, it is probably because you are tempted by more than 1 theme; Don’t go there).

Small advice for vertical pictures: Since the display screen will nearly always e horizontal, you can put two vertical/portrait pictures side-by-side to use all the surface.

• 1 format: All the pictures must be of the same format (JPEG, 8-bit, sRGB) and of the same size (No more than 1920 pixels width and 1080 pixels height) to better adapt to the projection tool.
• 1 copy: The pictures that you will show may be lost or deleted; Always show a copy on a small mobile device like a USB thumb-drive (don’t use the original files, from the original disk drive used for their archiving).
• Test it: Before starting, you’d better fully test the slide show with a simple viewer like Windows Picture Viewer or Mac Preview; This is rough, but it does the job and you don’t want to discover that nothing working front of your fan club.

With this, I can’t guarantee success, but I can tell that your slide show will go smoothly and your pictures will be showing their best colors.

It is no longer possible to list all the web sites that offer you the possibility to assemble a photo collage in a form that is appreciated by so many photographers despite its simplicity. Many web sites are characterized by the needed payments they request, but the idea has come a long way and what could be easily done with scissors and a glue stick, is now available on a computer near you. So, here are just two ideas I liked.

• PhotoVisi offers about the usual services with the main difference that you can freely download the image file in 1600×1200 pixels.
• ShapeCollage is letting your imagination roam freely with its huge choice of templates taking the form of nearly anything and because it is a free download software.

If, after that, you do not have ideas for your next photos, I’ll resign…

Closr solves this conundrum by providing you a way to upload your image to their web site. In return, you get a ready-to-install widget for your web site and all your friends will be able to zoom in or zoom out their hearts out.

Test the service with this panorama image I shot in the Masai Mara National Park in Southern Kenya in October 2008. You will have no difficulty finding the gnus (wildebeests) assembling themselves in a huge collection in preparation of the Great Migration crossing of the Mara river.

By the way: The Closr web site does not currently work with Opera v10, but Firefox is OK.

Several other products or in-development technologies also exist, like Gazopa (similar image search) or Imprezzeo (similarity search technology (not service, just a demo right now) or Picsout. But similarity-search is currently gaining speed.

Even if it is not always as precise as TinEye, it may be interesting when looking for a theme-based or form-based picture, rather than only the near-exact copy of an original image. That is what Google and Live Search are now offering or preparing.

• On Live Search Images, you can hover your mouse over any image and click the “show similar images” button.


Live Search: Click to get similar images

• More experimental, the Google Labs have started to present a Similar Search Engine (in English only)


Google Labs similarity search engine

• Less experimental, but less useful in its current too crude implementation, the normal Google image search now allows to select image colours you would like to see dominating the search results. You can get only blue images of the Eiffel Tower (below). But others did it better (YotoPhoto -now closed, Flickr ColrPickr or Multicolr Search Lab -only in Flickr demo).


Google: search only blue images

Technology is evolving. It’s up to us to create the corresponding uses.

PhotoPerfect Express is a freeware version of the $59.99 PhotoPerfect suite from Arcadia Software.

What I like most: It does not do much, but it’s what 90% of us need to start with an image (first optimization and enhancement) and it does it well, easily and precisely.

PhotoPerfect Express - step by step

MobaPhoto concentrates on a few actions (resize, crop or correct red-eyes) before preparing a photo gallery for your web site. Everything is geared toward batch processing (all images are mashed up in a row).

Even more interesting, Matt opened a Wildlife Photography Competition around a simple theme but with the added difficulty of a target rarely tried for wildlife photography: Portrait.

You can enter your participation (no more than 3 pictures) using this form. Your chance to win an Olympus SP-570UZ photo camera.