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Photoshop Express - How to edit your photos for free
Thursday, March 27th, 2008For any professional who wants to display images on the web, Photoshop Elements is a highly recommended tool. It’s a stripped down, affordable version of Adobe’s full Photoshop program, an industry standard for photo manipulation. The Elements version offers less tools, but for the most part, it’s all a web savvy sales professional will ever need.
Today, Adobe launched an even simpler product. Photoshop Express (let’s call it PSX). It’s feature set is even smaller, but the price can’t be beat. It’s free. PSX is not actually software. It’s a web based toll. That means it will work on any computer with web access. It’s another cloud computing tool like Google Docs.
I set out this morning to test out PSX’s viability as a tool for prepping photo’s for the web. The first step was to sign up. The service is free, but you do have to register.
Once you complete the registration form, a confirmation email is sent out. It could be because of launch day traffic, but this email took several hours. Once you confirm your account, simply sign in.
Before I an edit a photo, I need to upload it. PSX’s landing page points you in the right direction. Just click on “Upload Photos”.
This brought me to an upload page and automatically open a file window on my computer so I could choose the picture I wanted to edit.
I have a mac, so your folder might look a little different. Find a picture, click on it, and hit “Select”.
PSX offers up a confirmation page, giving you the option to upload the file to an existing Album, or upload additional pictures. We’ll skip that and just hit “Upload”
Now that our picture is in the system, PSX offers up a confirmation page, letting me know the upload was a success. Hit “Done”.
Now we are sent to the “Most Recent” section. Mouse over the picture you want to edit (in our case we only have one to choose from), and select “Edit Photo” from the drop down menu.
Now our picture is loaded into the editing tool. It’s a photo I took of the Denver Art Museum. I like how I captured the building, but it’s too dark, and I’m not sure I like the tree branches on the right side. Also, the resolution of this picture is too big for the web. I need to shrink it down so it will fit on my blog and loan quickly. We’ll use PSX’s basic editing tools to prep this photo for the web.
First I tried playing with the “Auto Correct” feature, but it didn’t seem to have much effect. Next, tried the Exposure tool. PSX offers up a scaled row of over and under exposed filters. I choose to move one step lighter in exposure. Just mouse over the one you want, and click on the green check mark.
The saturation tool works the same way. I choose the maximum setting. The “Fill Light” filter is was key in getting the picture where I wanted it color wise. Here’s a list of all the tools, and what they do.
Now we’re ready to crop out that tree. Click the “Crop & Rotate Button”. This brought up a grid over the photo. It wasn’t apparent to me how to proceed. Then I noticed little squares at each corner of the picture. By moving one corner (Square) at a time, I was able to select the area I wanted to crop out. Then I just hit that green check mark again.
I wasn’t really happy with that result. The tree is gone, but the picture is very square looking, and not nearly dramatic enough. I clicked the “Crop & Rotate” button again, and this time I played with the “Straighten” slider on the top of the menu. This lets you rotate and re-crop the image. It’s hard to explain, but easy to use. You’ll just have to play with it. Now I have the picture I want! I went ahead and saved it. (Click “Save”).
The save process took nearly a minute. Sort of slow, but it all worked.
Everything looked great except I still needed to resize the picture. I couldn’t figure out how to do it, so I refereed to the help menu. After finally making it to a Adobe support forum, I see that there is no option yet for resizing an image. This is a major bummer because this would be the perfect tool for 90% of bloggers who want to edit their photo’s for the web. A rep from Adobe has listed this as a “feature request”. I’ll come back and edit this post if things change.
Luckily, there’s a bit of a band aide solution. PSX gives you the ability to download the image back to your computer in three different widths. One of them is 256 pixels. A little smaller than I wanted, but much better than the 1477 pixel image I have created. Here’s the final result.
One other note. PSX offers file storage for your photos, but I would not recommend it. There’s some ambiguity in their terms of service that suggests that Adobe is claiming rights to them. For this reason, I would choose a service like Flikr for storing images online.
Overall, this is an extremely easy and cheap way to work on photos. Once it can resize them for the web, it will be pretty much perfect.
Brainious Podcast RemoteBreak debuts!
Friday, March 7th, 2008We are excited to announce that RemoteBreak launched today. RemoteBreak - where Real Estate, Mortgage, & Technology connect is being hosted on Podango.
If you want to keep up with the podcast as it develops, subscribe (w/iTunes) from Podango and whenever we roll out a new episode it will automatically download into your iTunes media player.
RemoteBreak is a bi-weekly podcast offering the latest news, tips, & reviews about technology for real estate and mortgage professionals. Join hosts Jason Berman, Todd Carpenter, & Ben Reubenstein as they help you discover how technology can assist your business in ways you hadn’t imagined.
Episode #1 highlights, we discuss Twitter, MacHeist application AppZapper, & go in depth about the hot networking site LinkedIn. We also interview Andrew Berman (no relation) of The Mortgage Press about his new endeavor FindMortgageJobs.com. Andrew reveals his profound love for Microsoft Outlook and Ben & I share a bonding moment over our first computer, the IBM PCjr.
The audio was a little rough for the recording but the quality will improve as we get some episodes under our belt. Not sure about the content. {lol} Have a great weekend ~ JB
Warning: Internet Explorer is hazardous to your business
Thursday, March 6th, 2008Most professionals in the real estate industry are busy. Family, career, and the pursuit of life all demand time and attention. An activity like surfing the web is not often rethought, retooled. However, be careful about habits left unchecked. Some time investigating your current choice of web browser is well worth it.
The new web is creating haves and have-nots. Those that can consume, process, and create content on demand will find success in growing their businesses virtually. The new web asks, “what can you do with your content?” Having a robust, open, standards based web browser is an advantage for the professional that understands its usefulness.
Current browser statistics show that 83% of the readers of this post will either be using IE6 or IE7. While that number is down from an all-time high of 95%, 4 out of 5 have stuck with Internet Explorer and do so presumably because of familiarity.
Security threats aside, IE works. However, IE limits the usefulness of your browsing experience. If you are like me and find yourself spending more and more time utilizing web tools, it isn’t a stretch to think that an inefficient browser might be costing you time and attention away from more important activities. Like making customers happy.
Our job at Brainious is to point out these dramatic shortcomings and convince, cajole, & compel you to get out of your ‘web surfing’ comfort zone. Here is what you could enjoy by making the switch to the open source project, Firefox.
Firefox is fast. I believe it loads significantly faster than IE. The real power is what you can do with Firefox after installation. There are thousands of free add-ons available from the Mozilla Foundation that will allow you to extend the functionality and usefulness of Firefox. This is often described an application’s extensibility.
Here are a few Firefox tips and tricks that I’ve picked up along the way.
- Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer - Organize your bookmarks once and for all. This plugin allows you to sync your bookmarks amongst all your computers. Before Firefox, I purchased some shareware to do this on IE. I was tired of looking for a bookmark on one computer and discovering that it existed on another. I was thrilled to find this plugin when I made the switch. Bookmark madness be gone.
- Shortcuts - Firefox is filled with shortcut commands that reduce your need to move your hands between keyboard and mouse. Heavy computer use can take a toll. Learn shortcuts to shorten the time it takes to do things & delay the onset of that nagging carpel tunnel problem.
- Adblock Plus - Another great plugin. This one stops ads in their tracks. It removes about 95% of all ads from all sites. Can’t even imagine what life was like before AP.
- Themes - There are hundreds of free themes available for Firefox. You can customize the look and feel of your buttons based upon easy to install themes available from Mozilla.
- Crash Protection - In the rare occasion when Firefox crashes, when relaunched it will automatically reopen all your work at the point it last crashed. Unbelievably useful.
- Tabbed Browsing - IE stole this little idea from the Firefox project. SeattleSoft loves to take good ideas.
- Customization - Simple and straight forward. Right click on a bookmark and customize its properties. Give it a shortcut, display just the icon on the toolbar, etc. I’ve filled my browser with about 25 icons that I use frequently. All fit in my menu bar running along the top. Very convenient. Each bookmark has a shortcut keystroke combination. Opening voicemail, email, to-do lists, etc. is a cinch as its all a few keystrokes away.
- Del.icio.us - Another plugin that makes tagging your bookmarks from within your browser a pain-free process. Tagging is one of the most useful research tools available. Listen to our 2nd Remote Break podcast to hear more about this.
- Google Notebook - Find content that you like online? Wish you had a way to save it for later reference. Once you have this plugin installed, you can highlight any content and right click it to put it immediately into your Google Notebook.
- Much Much More - Keep us posted on your progress. We’d love to hear questions or comments. Keep us posted on cool plugins or themes you are using in your own setup.
The new social web will leave you behind. Don’t be left out. If you are still using IE, give Firefox a try. IE will still be there when a tech-deficient bank or lender demands it (Countrywide, get with it!).
If this is your first experience with Open Source software, empower yourself to discover the geek inside. I suspect, if you give it a chance, Firefox will become a significant piece of your technology platform going forward.
Browse on!
Open source and cloud computing for everyone
Thursday, February 14th, 2008You may have seen in the news recently that Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo! It’s not the only web advertising play that Microsoft is making either. So why does a software company want to become a web company? Because the days of charging money for software are numbered.
There’s two computers sitting on my desk. One is is a $31 Linux box, the other is $2500 iMac. One can be used to edit photos, browse the web, manage email, act as a CRM/organizer, make Skype calls, or create spreadsheets, word documents, and Powerpoint style presentations. The other one costs $2500.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my Mac. I really like Windows computers as well. But the days when linux computing was something that only applied to ubber nerds are long gone. You can buy a linux computer from Wal-Mart for $200. I almost purchased it myself, but decided to see just how cheap I could build a system myself.
I got the computer itself for free. It’s a five year old Dell Pentium III that was running Windows 2000 as an operating system. It’s not powerful enough to run the latest Windows OS (Vista) so it became obsolete to my Brother and his business. He gave it to me, but you might already have a relic like this in your basement. I also scored a spare mouse from him, then headed off to CompUSA’s clearance sale for a monitor. I found a used VeiwSonic 19 CRT that they sold to me for $25. A few days later, I purchased a smaller footprint PS/2 keyboard from from Micro Center for $6. So there it is, a $31 dollar computer that runs eight year old software. That’s where the fun part comes in.
The WalMart machine that inspired this little experiment runs gOS. It’s a very simplified version of linux. The user interface is awfully similar to Apple’s OSX. It’s so simple, anyone will have the hang of how it all works in a matter of minutes. There’s a dock along the bottom of the screen where all your programs are. Double click on the program, and you’re up and running. Installing programs is not as easy as Windows, but it’s no biggy because gOS comes bundled with the following software.
Firefox web browser
Thunderbird email client
Skype Internet phone
GIMP image editor
Open Office word processoror, speadsheets & presentations.
A gazillion games like Solitaire
Plus some movie and music player stuff
The software is free. Yes, it’s not a scam, it’s really free. Each of these programs, including the OS, are open source projects. This means that a bunch of people work together to make a product, each volunteering their time, to build a free product for everyone.
I downloaded gOS from their web site, then burned it to a CD. The cool thing about the software is that you can then boot up your computer from the CD (load the CD, then restart your computer), to make sure the whole thing runs okay before installing it. 
Conversely, you could just buy the Walmart machine and everything will be ready to go out of the box. There’s a notebook coming as well, but it appears to be delayed.
Serious computer junkies will look to more powerful versions of Linux to meet their needs, but for an office workstation, this does just about everything you could want it to. The only real hurdle is that it won’t run proprietary windows software like Calyx Point. But I think it’s only a matter of time before software developers start porting their products to linux.
Now I know what your thinking, “but I need to create MS Word Documents”. I here you. Open Office is basically a free version of MS Office. You can create a “.doc”, send it to someone running Word, and they’ll never know the difference. However, I think there’s an even better way.
I’ve been running tutorials on Google Fu. gOS was built with Google Fu in mind. So instead of encouraging you to use Open Office, they encourage you to use Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Gmail. I agree. This strategy is called cloud computing, and we’ll further discuss this in future posts & tutrials.
RE Bar Camp - See us there!
Friday, January 25th, 2008
We’re heavily involved in a symposium on technology for real estate agents and mortgage brokers. It’s called RE Bar Camp, and it will be held this summer, in San Fransisco. The event is free to attend, thanks to a list of great sponsors, including us. Additionally, we are volunteers in making the event happen. I built a blog were you can find out more. I hope I’ll be able to meet you there!
Creating a free Loan Officer web site
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008Brainious is built on an extremely powerful social media platform called WordPress. The best thing about WP is that the platform itself is free. WordPress even offers a simplified version off the platform that is hosted for free at WordPress.com.
This is a multi-part tutorial on using WordPress to build a completely free website, built on WordPress. The site is live at freelo.wordpress.com. Here’s parts 1-8. More will come in the future, but this is enough to get you up and running.
Working with Comments permisions
Using Twitter to add market data
The site is live. You can see it at freelo.wordpress.com. Stay tuned. This is an evolving exercise.
Google Fu 5 - Google’s RSS Reader
Monday, November 19th, 2007Part 5 covers Google’s RSS Reader. You may be asking, “What’s RSS?” that’s a good question, and we recommend you watch our RSS tutorial first, to understand the basics of how it works.
Google Fu 5 - Google’s RSS Reader - 4minutes
Geek Warning - These simple videos are designed to help sales professionals with novice level web skills get up to speed. If you read Mashable or Geek Estate, there’s a good chance you’ll equate these videos to instructions on how to tie your shoes. However, you’re still welcome to watch!
RSS Demystified
Monday, November 19th, 2007
Ever wonder what RSS is? Or maybe what that weird looking orange square is for? Today’s tutorial is all about Real Simple Syndication
RSS Demystified - three minutes.
Once you’re through this tutorial, check out our Google Fu episode in the Google Reader for specifics on signing up.
Geek Warning - These simple videos are designed to help sales professionals with novice level web skills get up to speed. If you read Mashable or Geek Estate, there’s a good chance you’ll equate these videos to instructions on how to tie your shoes. However, you’re still welcome to watch!
Interviews of other great bloggers
Saturday, November 17th, 2007For several months now, I have been interveiring RE bloggers to find out their perspectives on this new medium. One of the best ways to learn how to be a great bloggers is by example.
What’s A Blog?
Friday, November 16th, 2007
Today’s tutorial covers blogs.
What’s a Blog - three minutes
This is a basic intro to blogs and gives you an idea as to just how easy it is to publish your ideas on one. To start blogging yourself, we recommend giving it a try at wordpress.com.
Geek Warning - These simple videos are designed to help sales professionals with novice level web skills get up to speed. If you read Mashable or Geek Estate, there’s a good chance you’ll equate these videos to instructions on how to tie your shoes. However, you’re still welcome to watch!
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