Category: For Designers
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Free Image Editor
Mac OS X users (both PowerPC and Intel) who want an easy to use image editor for free--in this case, “free” as in “open source"--should download Seashore.
Seashore’s developers based their development on GIMP, but gave it a Mac friendly interface. Not all of GIMP’s features are in place, so it doesn’t have the same level of sophisticaiton as GIMP, but it’s easy to install, perhaps a bit easier to use, and does have some features that pros would appreciate. Layers, merging effects, tablet support, and the ability to save to TIFFs (without which I wouldn’t be able to use the program to do my job).
It won’t work for everyone, but it’s worth a look.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Free Photos
Bloggers, designers, and business users alike can find much to love about stock.xchng, a resource for free photos. The variety is astounding, the quality ranges from reasonably good to not so hot, and there are a number of different agreements restricting usage for some of the photos.
It is user created content--that is, the photographers put the pictures on the site themselves--so designers looking to use these photos in commercial, public are should be careful which pictures they choose. As far as I can tell, there are no model releases available.
Warnings aside, there are a ton of decent pictures here that can be used for a variety of projects. I personally have used stock from this site for internal documents and presentations.