iStockPhoto Raise Stock Prices for 2008

Low cost stock photography provider, iStockPhoto, will be changing its pricing structure as of January 7 2008. Credits for buying photography, videos and vector illustrations will cost between $0.97 and $1.30 depending on how many you buy.

Photos and vector illustrations still start at 1 credit each while videos start at 10 credits. The good news is that the weekly free photo, illustration and video are still… well, free.

You can see full details of the price rises on iStockPhoto’s pricing page.

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Photography , istockphoto, photographers, Photography, stock photography, stock photos, web photography

How to Improve Your Website for Only $1

Great photography! That’s one sure fire way to improve the first impression of your web site. Of course, in the long-term you have to focus on quality content and delivering what your readers want rather than just the immediate impact that photography can deliver. But no one can dispute that a great picture can lift the quality of any web page.

When I started out as a web designer in 1999, stock photography was much more expensive that it is nowadays. I would usually budget £60 per photograph and therefore it had to be part of the proposal process as the cost of stock photography could soon mount up.

A few years ago a new company called iStockPhoto came along and blew that business model out of the water, by charging only one US dollar per picture. This now means that you barely have to consider stock photography as a cost factor when designing web sites. Commissioning bespoke photography is of course an entirely different ball game, but the majority of web design uses stock images.

iStockPhoto’s inventory is huge and wide ranging and it differs from other libraries like Getty because any one with a digital camera has the opportunity to contribute to the site. Your work does have to be scrutinised and approved by picture editors, but if you can produce photographs of sufficient quality then you can upload and sell your work. There are three great benefits of being a member of iStockPhoto.

1. Top quality photography, illustration, flash files and video for only $1
2. Free weekly photo and free video
3. The opportunity to place your own work online and earn a commission on sales

To buy photographs, you buy a batch of credits (at the moment minimum 13) for $1 each. The more credits you buy, the cheaper the cost of the credits. Depending on the size of the image you require, some may cost more than $1, but for use on a web site, most of the time, the $1 size and resolution is sufficient.

The current weakness of the dollar against most currencies means that the real cost of stock photography has gone down even further. Not such great news for those in Europe selling their work on iStockPhoto, but the range of this company’s contributors is truly global and this will ensure that new work in contributed all the time.

So if you’re a web site owner or a budding web designer sign up for for iStockPhoto, download some free images and find some great pictures that will help separate your web site from the competition.

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Photography , dollar, improve your web site, Photography, stock photography

Free Fridays #2 How To Create Graphics and Edit Photos For Free

Photoshop is one of the giants of photo editing, but at over £500 for a new installation of the current version (CS3), it’s not worth the price if all you need to do is crop and tidy up some photographs for your web site.

A great alternative image editor for Windows users is Paint.net. It’s compact, easy to use, and feature-rich enough for most people. The project started out as an undergraduate project that was mentored by Microsoft and it has now developed into a mature open source project. Paint.net was ranked number 19 in the top 100 products of 2007 by PC World Magazine.

The great thing about Paint.Net is that they have managed to cram loads of features into a very small programme. The download is only 1.3 Mb. One very popular feature of Photoshop amongst amateur users is the wide range of effects. Paint.Net has an equally impressive selection of effects. All of the usual suspects are included; Gaussian, motion and radial blurs, distortions and red eye removal. There’s even support for layers, taking it beyond the realm of just amateur use.

Paint.net is an open source project, so if you’re into that kind of thing, you can download the actual source code for the programme and adapt it or contribute to the project.

If, like most non-professional users, your day to day requirements for photo editing software is to reduce an image size for your website, export it to a different format or to crop the picture to make it a bit slicker, Paint.Net covers all those bases. You can work in all the popular formats, bmp, gif , jpg, png, tiff, TGA and it’s available in several languages. (English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish)

At the time of writing, version 3.2 was in Beta. You can download this or the current stable version for free from www.getpaint.net

Update: 12 December 07, Paint.Net 3.2 was released.

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software, Photography , Free Software, graphics, paint.net, photo editing, Photography, photoshop