50 Time Saving Photoshop Actions for Enhancing Photos
Adjusting and enhancing photos in Photoshop can involve a lot of trial and error, and be very time consuming. Thankfully their are actions to make our job easier. Here are 50 excellent Photoshop actions that can add professional looking enhancements to your photos with the click of a button. There are a few links below that contain more than one action.
Bright Eyes
Old Photo Action
Cool photo effect action
Soft Elegance
Pencil Draw Photoshop Action
InFection
Old style sepia effect
Photoshop Photography Action Set (8 actions)
Polaroid GENERATOR V1 (9 actions)
Vintage
Diabolic
Dim and Jade
Lith Print
Gradient action
Red action
Sharp action
Dream Blur
Oscar Pilch Photoshop Action
Wedding Enhancers (12 actions)
Black white sepia
Photo Coloring II
Stylish Sepia
Retro
Photo Coloring 11.2
Posterous + iPhone = Perfect Mobile Platform
Much like a migratory bird is genetically driven to fly south for the winter, I am driven to bloviate online. And so over the years I’ve accumulated my fair share of blogging accounts. I’m very active on Twitter, have a WordPress blog, a Flickr account, Facebook, and a rarely-used LiveJournal account. Keeping them all updated is frustrating, though. I’ve ended up just posting to WordPress and using the Twittertools plug-in to feed the post to Twitter (which also feeds into Facebook). It’s not elegant, but it works.
I’ve said before that my iPhone is the command center for my life, and at the same time noted that there’s no real end-to-end solution that will let me blog across all services on the iPhone. The full-featured WordPress site is unbearable, and the iPhone app for the same just doesn’t cut it. I can use the drafts method to get an article off my iPhone and into a better front end, I can use Tweetie for Twitter, and I can easily email photos to my Flickr account. But I was struggling to find a one-button solution, but now I have: Posterous.
Now, I’m not going to lie to you folks: While we at TheAppleBlog pride ourselves on bringing you All Things Apple, All Day Long, this post doesn’t necessarily require a piece of Apple-made technology to work. However, if you’re like me and just like reading fun tales of how people use their iPhones in their daily lives you’ll forgive me this one transgression.
Posterous is the latest entry to the micro/social blogging scene; its closest competitor is Tumblr. I’ve got a Tumblr account and have found it lacking, though I can’t quite put my finger on why. I think when I started using it I was trying to force it into being the one-stop solution it wasn’t. I could get my tweets to work with it, and I could get my WordPress account to suck up the feed and Tumblr to do the same, but it always felt like a duct-taped solution. Part of the problem is Tumblr has a counter called Tumblarity which goes up and down as you use — or don’t use — the tool. I’m OCD and that number’s lack of movement bugged the heck out of me because only posts that originated in Tumblr affected that counter; using the feeds didn’t.
Posterous is shining where Tumblr let me down, thanks to a very ingenious tool: email. I tell Posterous what email addresses to accept missives from and it will then happily feed all of my blogging services the contents of that message. It’ll dump them right into my personal blog, create a self-promotional tweet with a link, upload the photo to my Flickr account, create a LiveJournal post, and (something that keeps my OCD happy) create a Tumblr post in a manner that will make my Tumblarity go up.
If you click on this link to my Posterous account, and the links to all the sites I linked to above, you’ll likely see a post with a picture of a very nice motorcycle. That entire post was created on the iPhone and Posterous did the dirty work of cross-posting. So far, the only negative I’ve seen is just when the photo is uploaded to Flickr — I was hoping the message would get added as commentary.
Since my iPhone is always with me, Posterous is letting me carry through on ‘That’s neat, I should blog about that’ inspirations with a tool that requires no set-up or even an Internet connection until I want to upload. I love that I can see a picture of a neat bike on a street corner, snap the pic and in seconds have all of my blogs updated. With so many friends using different blogging platforms, Posterous feels like the Adium of blogging tools.
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10 Things You Must Do to Earn Your Audience’s Trust
Brandon Mendelson is the coordinator for the Business Card Build-Off, part of America’s largest crowdfunded project, A Million High Fives. Follow @BJMendelson for project updates.
Lincoln once said, “With the public trust, anything is possible. Without it, nothing is possible”. Social media is now a daily activity that millions of people around the world consume and participate in. This is the first time in human history that anyone, no matter who you are or where you are has an opportunity to create, share, and prosper, and if you’re going to succeed and stand out in a heavily crowded social media ocean, you need to earn your audience’s trust.
For those entrepreneurs who have increasingly turned to crowdfunding to fund their projects as advertising dollars dry up, earning trust has become especially important. If you fail in earning the public trust, your project won’t go anywhere, and you won’t be able to raise funds. If you rely on your users to financially support your product, then earning their trust is paramount, because they’re not going to back you if they don’t trust you.
Below is a list of ten things you must do to earn the trust of your online audience. The list is written from a crowdfunding perspective, but this advice really applies to anyone working in social media and seeking the trust of their users.
Earning the Public Trust
1. Tell us who you are. Do you have a website with your name as the domain? If not, get a social networking profile, fill it out completely, and use the domain to point to your profile.
2. Choose your best picture. Common sense, right? But you also want to avoid staged photos that look like you’re selling real estate. Look for a photo that tells your story and use it consistently across all your profiles.
3. Don’t setup a profile on every network. Find your tent poles (Twitter, Facebook), then use one or two smaller networks, like FourSquare and Streamy, and maintain a healthy presence on them. This way, you are where the crowd currently is, and positioned for where they will be.
4. Own your subject. You don’t need to be an expert at first. You should work hard to become one, but when you’re starting out, you should find the book other books and websites in your area reference. Read that book. As time goes on, pick up the books that book referenced. Most non-fiction books tend to regurgitate what’s already out (ditto for websites), but by going to the core book and then going from there you will be ahead of the game.
5. Don’t be fake. A problem many people face online is that we’re sensitive to what everyone wants, so we try to fake it. Nobody wants to give money to a phony. Take the material you’ve learned and put your own spin on it. It won’t be for everyone, but everyone won’t give you money, anyway. People who like and trust you, however, will. Find your voice and the people it appeals to.
6. Be Available. Can I call you? Can I send snail mail? If you want money from your audience and press attention, you need to provide a way to quickly and easily contact you.
7. Be Transparent. Matthew Zachary of the I’m Too Young For This Foundation once said to me that his organization was “Obama-like” in terms of transparency. For any project using your audience’s money, you too have to be “Obama-like” in your transparency. Public budgets, public documents, public receipts, even your emails should be public. Not everything has to be released in the early stages — many crowdfunders fear the loss of their idea to a competitor — but when the project is in motion, open your vaults.
8. Write for the web. People won’t trust what they won’t read. Keep your material short, simple, and useful. Use sub-headings, have a great first sentence (your lead), and keep the article short.
9. Document everything. How are you keeping us posted? Use video more than tweets and blog posts, and update your audience (at least) once a week. Video is the most personal method of online communication.
10. Answer every message. Tweets, video comments, emails. Answer everything. Even if it takes you forever, reply to everyone. If you are building an audience, you have a responsibility (and note, I’m saying you, not your assistant) to reply to your audience until the project has finished.
Earning the public trust takes time. But by following these ten steps consistently, you will be able to help your project succeed.
More social media resources from Mashable:
- How to Be Generous: A Guide for Social Media Brands
- A Control Freak’s Guide to Social Media Influence
- The Importance of Focus: A Guide for Social Media Brands
- 5 Easy Social Media Wins for Your Small Business
- Tweetable Eats: What Street Vendors Can Teach Businesses About Twitter
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mevans
Reviews: Streamy, Twitter, facebook, iStockphoto
Tags: crowdfunding, Lists, public trust, social media, Trust
