Fotolia

Fotolia © juanjo tugores

A couple weeks ago I was invited to review the stock photo site Fotolia. I was given a limited subscription to use trying out the service. You can see some of the images that I've used on this blog by clicking here. The value of the subscription given to me is approximately $40 per month.

Quality
The quality of the images is phenomenal. Each shot is thoroughly professional. Many of the images have a plain white or black background making them ideal for inserting into a presentation. There are many images that have already been edited (like the one appearing to the right for example) to produce some nice effects. I bet you can't guess why I liked this one.

Quantity

The number of images available is huge. I haven't run out in the short time that I've been searching through the database. It's obvious that the main focus for Fotolia is the business sector. You'll find the majority of the images are people in business suits or other business-type images. It's not bad, but if you want something else you may need to dig a bit deeper to find the right fit.

There is a good selection of religiously themed images available as well as images that appropriate for illustrating Biblical passages. I found the image to the left when searching for images to go with Psalm 23.

Searching
I found that searching was tolerable. The images are labeled with tags which then give you keywords to search with the ever-present search box. That's fine and par for the course, but the keywords are applied liberally to pictures so you might get some odd results when searching. One trick I found was to use some search modifiers. So I could search for "happy" but that might bring up to many babies for what I'm wanting so I would add "-babies" to the end then re-search. Using the minus sign and words I wanted to exclude helped. However they don't support wildcards (* and ?) so you will have to exclude each keyword specifically (e.g. "-babies" "-baby").

Browsing
I'm including this as a separate section from searching since finding the right picture will always require looking at them. Fotolia has a nice feature that allows you to see a thumbnail for the images but then if you hover your mouse over the image for a moment a larger preview will pop up. You can scan to see the pictures that you like then pause on them to get a better view. It makes browsing through lots of pictures much easier. One glitch in this feature shows up in the Google Chrome web browser. If the pop-up goes off the edge of the web browser area to the right then a side-to-side scroll bar will appear at the bottom, but then it doesn't go away when you move on. It doesn't interfere with future previews, but the thumbnails under the scroll bar are obscured. Annoying but not a deal-breaker.

Downloading
Grabbing the images is a multi-step process. First click the image, then click the download link. If you're not using a subscription you will choose the size of the image here. Then check-out from the next page before you're ready to click the download link to get your photo. I understand the need for all the steps since they serve both subscribers and ala carte customers, but when downloading multiple images the process feels a little clumsy and protracted. Again, a mild annoyance, but nothing the keep you away from the service.

Pricing
Subscription plans start at $199 a month for one user to download up to 25 images a day. That's not bad if you're grabbing tons of photos. But if you just need one or two images it might be a better deal to buy them one at a time. You can buy the images for as little a $0.75 apiece. That size would be OK for a blog post, but wouldn't be great for a PowerPoint presentation. Grab something in the $3.75 to $7.50 range for projecting. The sizes are labeled with the size in XS - extra small through XXL - double-extra large. Don't drop below a medium (M) for PowerPoint.

Overall

Fotolia provides a huge amount of images, videos and illustrations. It may take a while to find them based on the tagging and searching, but when you do find them they will be extremely high quality. To my eye, some of the images were a bit too staged looking. I was looking for a gritty image of a firefighter with dirt and ash on his sweaty face. It wasn't to be found. I had to settle for something a bit less personal, but still very good.

I used the images from Fotolia to put together this presentation, which I could not have done without the excellent images they provided. I would recommend Fotolia as a place to go when you need the perfect image to make your point. It may not be a daily driver for most preachers due to the cost, however.

Photo Editing Basics: Tools

The tools you use to edit photos give you all sorts of options to interact with what you see on the screen. There are selection tools, move tools, filling tools, drawing tools, shape-making tools and erasing tools. Most of those are pretty common and self-explanatory. Use them on a test image a few times and you'll get the basic idea of how things work. Look at the tool palette to the left from Paint.NET (which is my favorite photo editor).

There are a few specialized tools, however, that need some introduction. The "Magic Wand" tool (fourth row on the left in the picture here) allows you to "magically" select the edges of a shape in the picture you're editing. This works well for shapes with defined edges against a solid-color background, but you can essentially click anywhere on the edge you want to to define and the magic wand will select the whole edge automatically. Remove the shape from the picture by pressing "Ctrl+X" and you can paste the shape into another image or fill in the area where the shape was in the original image.

The "Eye Dropper" or color select tool (five up from the bottom on the right) allows you to get the exact color of any pixel on the screen. Select the tool then click on a spot on the screen. That precise color will now be selected in the color wheel in your photo editing software. So if you wanted to fill in a matching color you could then select the fill tool and know that the color would be just the same as the object you selected. This won't work as well for complex shading where there are several subtle varieties of the same color with different saturation and hue (more on that later). But for brightly lit images with solid colors, the eye dropper does wonders.

Finally the "Clone Stamp" tool is a favorite of photo editors (fourth from the bottom on the left), but often misunderstood or not used at all by amateurs. What it does it sets two points on the screen of equal size the you select the distance apart for them. When you click the exact image under the first region is cloned and stamped on the second region defined by the tool. This is a very cool tool if you want to remove a blemish on a face. Just clone some of the normal skin over the blemished skin and the blemish disappears. Typically you need to zoom in pretty far when you're doing this (using the zoom tool that looks like a magnifying glass) so that the effect won't be obvious when looking at the picture zoomed out.

What tools do you find indispensable when editing pictures?

Photo Editing Software Roundup

Photo editing software is going to be necessary at some point. You'll need to crop, remove red-eye or completely transform an image. The level you get into things is really up to you, but you need to have some tools at your fingertips.

Many thanks to Lifehacker for their useful Hive Five series that gave me a list of the five best image editing tools and the five best online image editing tools.

Desktop software:

Adobe has a slew of photo editing tools that have become the standard in the image editing industry. Photoshop has even become a verb to denote editing an image. The $700-$1000 price tag means that only professionals are going to use the high end software. The next level down is Lightroom which is about $300 and offers all the photo organizing and editing tools that most people will need. Lightroom is focused on giving photographers a way to mess with the pictures they've taken rather than the full on graphic design done in Photoshop. The most stripped down version is Photoshop Elements for $99 which offers great resources and tools (and probably more than most people will ever need). Think of it as what the full Photoshop was three or four years ago.

In the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) camp are GIMP and Paint.NET, which is what I use by the way, I use it because it's free and because it has most everything that I could ever want. I was able to make the graphic header for this blog with Paint.NET and there are a lot of other options available. Basically the difference between Paint.NET and Photoshop is that you'll have to do a lot of things manually in the FOSS that are automated in the Photoshop family. How much are you willing to pay for convenience?

Google offers the Picasa photo organizing software that also has quite a bit of editing power baked in. Just like you can click "I'm Feeling Lucky" when searching with Google, you can click it in Picasa and the software will automatically crank out the adjustments to the image that it thinks are best. If you have a huge database of images with people in them, Picasa has a handy face recognition feature that is fairly accurate. This is also free.

Online Tools:

There are several online image editing tools that allow you to upload your image to their website, edit it and then download the finished product. Most of them share similar features, what sets them apart is the speed of the software. Lifehacker prefers Aviary, but there's also Pixlr, and SumoPaint to consider. If you want to use the Adobe software they now have an online version of Photoshop. Finally, when I need to edit photos online I use Picnik because I like the interface and because you can install it as an app in Google Chrome.

Update: Unfortunately, Google is closing the doors on Picnik, effective April 19, 2012. It's probably a good idea to start learning another online application, if Picnik has become your go-to online photo editor.

What tools are your favorite?