I've already blogging here for about 2 weeks and noticed some drawbacks but these Google new features (especially new template customization system and tags which are for some reason called "labels") made me happy. Really :)
Often using Photoshop for routine matters I dreamt of making collages (like these). And finally my dream comes true (nice cliché, heh). Yesterday I registered at worth1000.com, read a lot of rules and guidelines and now suppose I know what to do.
Photoshop contests for beginners are held constantly and I’ve already participated some. My results, hmm…, I wish they were more prominent. My first successful image I’ll post here and hope soon. So one more useful site is worth1000.com (what a piece of news!)
It seems the quantity of blogs keeps on growing from day to day. It’s excellent. And the same time it’s terrible. The ratio between worthy and worthless blogs changes constantly. Suppose these changes are negative.
What are the ways to find some interesting content?
One of the most popular ways is visiting aggregating sites (joint blogs, catalogs of blogs) where there’s not so much content but a lot of links sorted and categorized. The main minus is that in some way you don’t choose what to read and to look. Everything is done for you. You see only what other people shows to you, what is interesting to the most of the audience. But the advantages of such sites trump the drawbacks. It’s a really great way to find nice blogs and sites quickly and surely.
The other method is searching by yourself, browsing and browsing lots of pages. The efficiency of this way is quite low, but the results may be fine. Blogger.com fit for exploring badly. That links in your profile (interests, movies, books) works poorly.
Still everything is not so bad :) Google provides a powerful tool for searching blogs at blogsearch.google.com. Use Advanced Blog Search page to tweak your queries and get incredible results.
I had my first blog at livejournal.com where tracking replies to your comments, your friends' posts and comments to your posts is easy (you may tune your account and receive e-mails for each comment).
When I started blogging at blogger.com I found out that here there's no "replies" to your comment, only comments to your post and there's no any e-mail notifications. So watching some interesting conversation is a labourios process.
And I found a solution. Co.mments.com is a very useful free tool to track comments. Try it and you'll see.
Not being a great photographer, I’m keen on taking pictures and have some secrets. One of the main problems of digital photos is noise (visible red and green grain present in the image). Here is example:
There are some ways to remove noise. I’d like to tell about Neat Image software. It reduces most high ISO noise, film grain visible in scanned slides and negatives, JPEG artifacts in overcompressed images.
Open input image on the first tab, go to the tab “Device noise profile” and press the button “Auto profile”, go to the tab “Output image” and press the button “Apply”. That’s all. Now you can save your less noised image in fine JPEG quality even in trial version. Here is processed example image:
A useful side effect of Neat Image noise reduction is that noise-free images are better compressable. By reducing noise you can reduce the JPEG file sizes by 30-40% (even if the same compression level is used to save both noisy and noise-free images).
Try to guess what’s on the example photo and see the answer
Download Neat Image (2.1 Mb)
www.flickr.com
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