Web Tutorials
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.
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!
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!
Google Fu 4 - A quick look at iGoogle
Thursday, November 15th, 2007Part 4 is a quick look at iGoogle. This is a neat program to build a customer start page.
Google Fu 4 - iGoogle - 2 minutes
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!
Google Fu 3 - Gmail’s Forwarding Features
Thursday, November 15th, 2007Part 3 in our Google Fu series is for people who want to access gmail through an email client like MS Outlook, of even an iPhone.
Google Fu 3 - Gmail’s Forwarding Features - 3 minutes
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!
Google Fu 2 - Getting Started With Gmail
Thursday, November 15th, 2007Part 2 in our Google Fu series covers some of the basics of working with gmail. Enjoy!
Google Fu 2 - Getting Started With Gmail - 5 minutes
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!
Google Fu 1 - Get Your Google Account
Thursday, November 15th, 2007This is our first official brainious tutorial! Most of you know Google as a search engine. There’s a whole lot more to it. Google offers alternatives to MS Office, photo storage and editing, time management tools, email solutions, and more. To get started though, you’ll need to sign up for a free account.
Google Fu 1 - Get Your Google Account - 4 minutes
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!
