I just found a great and quite easy way to create your own font, out of your own handwriting: YourFonts.com

You simply download a template and, using a medium-thick pencil, input your letters and scan them. The website will, after examining the uploaded file, offer you free preview of your font. If you like it, you download your own font for around 9 dollars. Amazing, isn't it?

Photoshop is really useful, professional and complex program. You can do pretty much anything picture-related using Photoshop. But not without understanding the basics, not without taking the time to learn from others. Here are some tutorials that helped me, or that have been recommended to me:

• Adobe original tutorials - believe it or not, Adobe publishes several free of charge tutorials. I really like them - they are not as complex as LPN, but it is a good start and I found it quite useful.
• Learn Photoshop Now - free trial video, then you need to buy the access. Advantage is the complexity of this tutorial, they have all the different versions covered, which is impressive.
• You Suck At Photoshop - the funniest tutorial for Photoshop. Ever. Donnie is a (fictional) Photoshop master, who, however, has many other problems. Of course, he tries to solve them using Photoshop, cleaning the carpet or deleting the wedding ring, and generally making you laugh really hard. One of the funniest tutorials ever. Of course, again, you won't find it useful if you are a beginner who wants to learn Photoshop, but they are just fun to watch.
• YouTube - and if you have a very specific question about how to do something in Photoshop and for some reason you don't want to pay for professionally made tutorial, try googling questions like change hair color photoshop tutorial and something will pop up. Unfortunately, these are often videos of poor quality (which I don't mind) and poor understanding of principles of bitmap editing (which is much worse). 

If you have any other favorite Photoshop tutorials, I'll be happy to hear form you. I'm always happy to learn new things in Photoshop.

I was recently wondering how to decide what kind of preview to choose when importing photos into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.5. Basically, you have four options:

• Minimal Preview
• Embedded and Sidecar Preview
• Standard Preview
• 1:1 Preview

These are very different, since they use different time to render and also take up different amount of space on your HDD in the database. So which one to choose? 

I personally opt for Standard preview most of the time - it gives you previews big enough to go through your pictures quickly in their Loupe resolution (almost fullscreen). That is great for most of the occasion, and you can of course still always zoom in (takese maybe two seconds then).

These two seconds you would save if you chose 1:1 Preview option, since that is the one where the whole image in full resolution is rendered. Ideal when you need to zoom in often, perhaps to check the noise level or sharpness, or when looking for little details. Obviously, this takes up a lot of space on HDD.

If space is the key factor, go for either one of the first two, the difference is negligable - Minimal renders just the very small preview, Embedded and Sidecar adds the internal preview (not always accurate, mind you).

• More details in this article on Preview options in Lightroom

Now is the time to upload all your Christmas photos on-line. Advertisers and editors alike are writing frantically on anything related with this world-wide holiday and they will need tons of pictures with the x-mas spirit. 

• Anything that is gift-wrapped
• Pile of gifts
• People giving and receiving gifts
• Christmas tree
• Santa Claus
• christmasy backgrounds
• Different people with the Santa hat

Combine this with as-specific-as-possible objects (netbook, computer, oven, sledge, snowball, plasma TV, camera, singing, resolution) and you are bound to boost your sales a bit.

• Example of Christmasy stock photography

This is the question everyone who experiments with stock photography is asking: what type of photography is profitable for me? What kind of objects, style, genre and composition should I choose to maximize my profits?

Well, the question has more dimensions than first apparent. For example - the most profitable style for you is not neccessary the most demanded, it might be the one nobody thought of before. But listing the most demanded stock photography pictures seems like a good place to get overall idea.

Shutterstock provides us with these links:

• Most popular 50 images on Shutterstock ever
• Top 50 images of the week
• Top 100 searches ever

We can see that general, bright, wallpaperish images lead the way, spreading happy thoughts and associating professionality. They are clear, heavily photoshoped, unreal, but obviously working. Top searches include, of course, flower, music, woman, business, family, sport, globe, fitness, art or eye.

These might serve as sort of inspiration, but remember - you are not the only one studying this list. Therefore I recommend to learn from the style, but do not get caught up in trying to immitate these - you'll be burried in the results too deep.

Dan Heller was one of the first photographers I noticed when starting with digital photography. It was probably because of his beautiful star trails photography, which I recommend you to explore. Recently I realized Dan Heller is very active writing, too. Here are some links useful for photobanks and stock photography:

• The Stock Photography Business
• Model Releases
• How to sell prints
• Other Dan Heller's Tutorials

Don't get discouraged by the old-timey web design - these pages will provide you with boatloads of information and the pictures Dan Heller sells show that he knows his way around.

If you are making money through photography or would like to do so in the future, you can never learn too much. To help you find new resources, I'll be publishing some useful links on this blog. The first batch of useful links for beginners in stock photography can be found here.

Today, I want to link one interesting project:

• PhotoPreneur.com - great web for every owner of digital camera who wants to learn new things, keep in touch with new technologies and find inspiration on how to make pictures and how to use them or publish them. They also have some articles on stock photography, like The Beginners Guide to Stock Photography

On an unrelated note, Shutterstock recently rejected few of my pictures based on "Poor Lighting--Poor or uneven lighting, or shadows. White balance may be incorrect." Please be advised that their criteria seem to be more strict than it used to be the case and be carefull when manipulating the exposition of your picture.

Here are few articles that helped me with my stock photography (photobanks) experiments. Hope you'll find them useful, too.

• Why was my photography refused?
• How to improve sky in stock photography?
• How to sell your photos? (Russian)
• MikroFotoBanky (Czech)

There are numerous videotutorials, too. Let's see at least one here, you can of course find them on YouTube.

And a word of warning: once you start photography as a business, it might be less enjoyabel for you...

Our new blog about photobanks and stock photography has been launched today. Stay focused on it and we will try to keep you informed - the market is wild and seems to be growing, so selling your pictures is definitely a good idea. You can read new posts on this blog via the RSS feed.