If you haven’t already heard of Zazzle.com, you should delay no further. It is one of the top online marketplaces for buying and selling cool custom stuff: from stickers, to stamps, cards to calendars, bags to buttons, neckties to t-shirts — their custom product offerings are staggering. While many people on Zazzle.com are creating their customized products merely for fun — a custom postage stamp for save the date cards here or a poster for last year’s favorite vacation photo there — the company has compelling offerings for the artist looking to earn money and grow a customer base around their work.

Getting Started
Zazzle.com requires marketplace sellers to sign up for a free account. The process is fast, easy and simple. Within minutes, you’ll be ready to upload your digital files and begin customizing products. Once your account is created, you will need to first upload your digital artwork files that will populate your images portfolio. Once uploaded, you must create a store that you will sell your custom products through. The store creation process allows you to choose from 20 pre-configured templates or you can customize your own. The basic customization process allows you to change colors and header images for the pages of your store — not only are you provided a basic product page template, but you are also given an “About” page to place information about yourself and your artwork. You will even have a “Fan Club” page for your customer raves and testimonials! One useful feature of the Zazzle.com store model is that you can make the store private, meaning that it will not show up in general searches through the Zazzle.com search engine. This will allow you to customize the store to your liking before you make it available to the public or even build up some excitement around your “launch” date in advance of your store’s public opening.

Costs

Getting started with Zazzle.com costs nothing. There are no upfront setup costs or membership fees. Your store is free to operate and run, furthermore you will pay nothing to host your product images on Zazzle.com. The cost model on Zazzle.com is very simple. Every product has a Zazzle-determined base price and royalty percentage. For example, a 16×20″ poster has a base price of $19.95 and the standard royalty is 10%. That means you will make $1.95 for every sale of that 16×20″ poster. However, Zazzle.com extends the royalty model further by allowing you to “Name Your Royalty”. If you want to make more than the standard 10%, Zazzle.com adds the percentage over 10% to the cost of the item and you take that home. In the case of the $19.95 poster, say you want to make a 30% royalty, the final product price will be $25.65 and your royalty will be $7.69. Zazzle.com will handle the math for you — the key is to price your items fairly.

Getting Paid
Once you have established your public store and Zazzle.com has taken your custom artwork from digital file to final product and collected the customer’s money, it is time for you to collect yours. Once your earnings reach $25, Zazzle.com will begin sending your money on a monthly basis. You can specify whether you want to have your money sent via check or electronically through Paypal.

Is Zazzle For You?
Zazzle.com has many benefits : a free, mature and easy to use system for uploading your artwork and creating a custom turnkey storefront, a large number of products to customize and a generous royalty system that is fair and easy to understand. The Zazzle.com marketplace is huge, with thousands of stores and millions of products, so getting a competitive edge will take some creativity, ingenuity and commitment. A successfully start, will undoubtedly begin with a marketing campaign to bring awareness to your artwork, and once you have a few customers, building from that base will make it easier to sell more by introducing new products and new artwork. If you are an artist looking to get more out of your digital works by selling customized products into the Internet marketplace, Zazzle.com should be on your list as a serious tool to get serious results.

Making panoramas in PS Elements 6 has never been easier. This simple tutorial will show you how to get the most out of the Photomerge feature of PSE6 to make high quality panoramas of any style or size.

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Managing your images in PS Elements 6 is very easy. This simple tutorial will show you how to get started and get you started on backing up your images, storing them offline and beginning the process of reclaiming precious disk space on your local hard drive. Watch this short screencast to find out just how easy going offline with your images can be!

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Sorry about the clicking audio … I’m working on finding and fixing the problem soon!

In the last WW we talked about physical file organization, file renaming and metadata tagging. Most people are probably familiar with basic file organization concepts – making directories, sub-directories and moving files around between these directories. But few people are probably more deeply familiar with file renaming and metadata tagging.

We’re going to begin with some groundwork, then move into 2 screen casts showing you how to do these things.

Renaming Within The Operating System

When in comes to file renaming, we’re going to talk about 3 options available. The first option is renaming directly within the operating system. If you’re using Windows XP or even Windows Vista, you may not know it, but there are some file renaming tools built into the system that you can take advantage of.

Using A Renaming Tool

The second option is to use a renaming tool. There are a lot (repeat a lot) of tools out there, but there is a tool we’ll talk about here that really stands out. Not only is it free (though the creators would love to get donations if you find the tool useful), but it is one of the most useful, stable and robust renamers I’ve seen. While the options may be daunting at first, the tool does show you a preview of the final renamed file so you can make sure it looks the way you want it to before you commit.

Since there are so many options, we’ll give you a guided tour of the basic options available, then let you decide for yourself if the tool is for you or not.

Bulk Rename Utility by Jim Willsher
Windows XP/Vista
http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php

Using PSEs Renaming Feature

File renaming in PSE is actually rather convenient, and there are two ways to do it. The first way is to actually rename files upon import. If you decide to follow the file renaming guidelines in the WW#3, you may have a little trouble keeping the original name of the file and instead may have to adopt a renaming scheme that includes the date as suggested, but then instead of retaining the unique name the camera gave the file, you will have to use a new random numeric name or some other value to your choosing. We will show you how to do this so that least your file names are numbered in order. Since the file renaming is occurring at import, you’ll have no problems following the suggested workflow step of backing your files up immediately, since from that point forward, all your edited files will have the new name.

The second way is to rename your files from within the editing tool of PSE. We’ll show how both of these methods can be used to achieve the same basic result.

Which is best?

Understanding which option to use is no simply choice. It will depend largely on how whether you want to use one or more tools outside of your primary editing and organizing tool (like Photoshop), or whether sticking with a single tool for everything is more important to you. Since I tend to have a more complex naming scheme, I am comfortable using additional tools that provide features not part of my editing and organizing tool. The choice will be largely dependent on your preferences and needs!

Look out soon for the two screencasts that explore the options available to you!

We talk alot about digital noise in images, and sometimes there’s nothing like a good example to really drive it home. A few weeks ago, a former student emailed me about “noisy” images and wanted details on what could be done to control it.

First, a little background on what noise is. Whenever you increase the ISO on your digital camera, you are increasing its sensitivity to light – it is the same as shooting with a different film speed in the analog film world. The benefits of doing this are clear :

• allowing hand-holdable shutter speeds in lower light situations (usually about 1/50th or 1/60th of a second )
• allowing indoor (and outdoor) photography with reduced flash power or no flash at all
• allowing broader depth of field with higher shutter speeds, especially in lower light situations

The list could go on, but these are a few quick reasons.

Now what does this digital grain look like and how can it be controlled? I’ll take a look at the first question.

Here is a photo taken at ISO 1600. Notice the graininess and color patches on the underside of the body of the sea gull. There isn’t anything wrong with the image – that’s digital noise! Notice how the noise seems more prominent in the shadow under the right wing (bird’s left). This is a common problem with noise – it likes to lurk in the shadows!

Imagenomic’s Noiseware “Community Edition” Standalone 2.6 is a freeware software tool that you can try out and see if it improves your shadows. Imagenomics makes several variants of this tool, and you can compare them all here : http://www.imagenomic.com/nwsa.aspx.

After running the Community Edition of the standalone tool, here is the side-by-side comparison.

You can see, the noise has really been improved without loss of details. Now the noiseless image is amazingly smooth and clear!

Shooting at high ISOs can be a tremendous creative tool for your photography. Now you can feel more confident about shooting at those higher ISOs without worrying about that annoying digital noise!

There are plenty of tools out there to remove noise and Imagenomic’s Noiseware is just one of many good tools to consider in your digital photo editor’s toolbox!

Wireless what? That’s right, wireless memory cards. A company in California will be the first to introduce wireless digital photography to the masses with their now available product called the “Eye-fi” card. It’s basically a 2GB SD card with a twist : it doubles up as a wireless transmitter to send your precious memories to your computer which can then be shipped to your favorite online site ( Snapfish, Walmart, Flickr, Shutterfly, among many others ).

Learn more directly from their website : http://eye.fi.

It’s happened to everyone at least once – you accidentally format a memory card or end up with a corrupt card. Before you panic there are tools out there bring hope back to what may seem like a hopeless situation. There are lots of tools – here’s one that seems to be getting some thumbs up.

http://www.joesoft.com/products/klix.php

This video will go over the basics of adding a photo to your account, signing up for the TKSeminars Flickr Group and putting a photo into the group photo pool.

Enjoy!

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This screencast goes through the basics of Flickr.com including signing up for an account. If you already have a Yahoo! or Flickr.com account you can skip this and go to part 2.

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If you’re at all familiar with the Fujifilm Velvia film, you know that the color saturation produced from this film is one of the best. Used a lot by landscapers, the color density of this particular film is know around the world, and many people can tell when the film us use “just by looking at the results”.

If you have Photoshop, you can achieve a similar effect with a FREE Photoshop action called TLR Digital Velvia. The action allows a few nice options : global saturation control, Red+Green control and Blue+Yellow control. You can increase or decrease the color in +5 and -5 levels.

Check out more details and a download from the site : http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com/TLRDigitalVelvia.htm.