Archive for the ‘DigiScrapping’ Category:
Some Sales going on in the printing world
Picaboo
Create a free photo book with Picaboo. Use code AFFLGB through March 31, 2010.
Kodak Gallery Sale:
25% off all Photo Books at Kodak Gallery with coupon code: BOOKMADNESS
HP Snapfish
March Promotion: Free Shipping on $30+ plus 50 Free Prints for New Customers, coupon code 30SHIP10
Viovio has a new 12×12 Imagewrap hard cover.
Subscribe to the comments for this postSave 40% off ACDSee Photo Manager 2009
You can save 40% off ACDSee Photo Manager 2009. Offer ends March 2.
Current holiday sales going on
Hooray
Save 20% on Cards and Prints at Hoorray.com
Save 20% on Holiday Photobooks and receive 30 free prints at Hoorray.com
Snapfish
25% Off Photo Cards! CouponCode 25CARD2009 Offer Expires 1/31
Stamps.com
Get up to $45 in FREE Postage at Stamps.com use code COUPON1. expires 12/31/09
Photoworks
Get 25% OFF photo books with code: HOLIDAYBOOK! Hurry, offer expires 12/10/09! Click Here!
Get 30% OFF photo cards with code: HOLIDAYCARDS! Hurry, offer expires 12/10/09! Click Here!
Sharing Categories with ACDSee Photo Manager
On the ACDSee Home Blog, I describe how you can share your categories with a friend. If you have a set of categories that you would like to share at DigiScrapInfo, please email it to me and I will add it to our collection of Organizing Styles.
Sharing Categories from ACDSee Photo Manager
& if you have already organized those images (assigned categories, caption, etc), how you can share those images and the other user gets all the pre-organized information.
Sharing your images and categories with ACDSee 2009
New fun way to follow blogs…
It’s call spectives and it allows you to create a collection (i.e. list) of blogs. It then pulls in IMAGES from the blog feeds. This is a great graphical way to view your blogs. Since digital scrapbooking blogs are so visual, this could be really slick & fun for us.
I started one here with 15 feeds. Some of my favorite plus the top 10 digi blogs (at the time I did it:)
http://www.spectives.com/digital-scrapbooking
Create an account and you can start your own collection or add someone else’s collection to your tabs.
To add a blog to your collection, find the Add a feed to this collection and enter the rss feed of the blog:
When adding, it will pull in the first image for the last 3 blog posts. After you a collection of blog lists, you will just see them updating whenever someone posts.
This is a new service that was just created in October, 2009 so it quite young yet. But even its young state it worth trying out!
I am hoping over time they keep adding features..I would like to see:
- An option/setting to pull all images from a post instead of the first one.
- Multiple ways/options to view the collection of images:
- More on each page instead of 12 (or an option to set how many on each page)
- Cooliris functionality
- Quick link to share your collection
- Ways to sort the collection
ACDSee has released ACDSee Pro 3
ACDSee released ACDSee Pro 3. This is their professional photo software organizer/editing images software. The cost of ACDSee Pro 3 is $169.99 but you have previous versions you can get a discount at 30% off.
Note: ACDSee has 2 major product lines – home & professional. The home versions are the ones used for digital scrapbooking organizing, ACDSee 9 (old), ACDSee 10(old), ACDSee 2009(most recent). The pro versions are ACDSee 2.0 & 2.5 (old) and this new release ACDSee Pro 3. If you are confused about which version is the best for you, here is their quiz.
Download your free 30 day trial of ACDSee Pro 3 now!
If you are person that takes a lot of photos and need to process RAW photos or like to tweak the lighting, color, etc of the images, then this product is for you. ACDSee Pro 3 competes against Adobe Lightroom. In ACDSee Pro 3 they introduced some new “modes.”
Manage Mode:
The Manage mode is the one where you your organizing, categorizing, and this is similar to ACDSee 2009 or ACDSee 2.5 and very little has changed here.
View Mode:
The view mode is to look at images larger. It basically is like Windows explore filmstrip version.
Process Mode:
The Process mode is where the majority of new additions were added. Think of the Process mode as the digital darkroom. In the Process mode there are 2 sub-modes, Develop & Edit. Develop is the non-destructive editing of the image. The Edit is the normal destructive editing. Whenever you Develop or Edit something, the originals are saved in a hidden folder so you can revert back to your original if you need. (And if you show hidden folders on your windows, you will see Developed & Originals folders if you have processed an image in that folder.) In the past, I typically took it upon myself to save the original and then do edits. With this tool, you can forget having to save the original and let the tool do it for you.
Process Develop mode (non-destructive editing) you have many different settings, here are the Tune, Detail & Geometry:
Process Edit mode (destructive editing) you have what appears to be some of the same as in Process and some additional editing tools.
So you have this Develop And Edit sub-modes in the Process mode and it seems just a little confusing. When this product was in Beta there was quite a discussion on this. So I wanted to clarify it but I think the best way is to quote a ACDSee’s developer from the beta forums:
Basically, you can think of bringing an image into develop mode as the same thing as bringing a roll of film into a photo lab. You bring your negatives into the shop and they develop them into a good looking image. Develop mode is our way of letting you control the way the lab tech develops your image. You walk out of the photo lab with the printed images (developed images), and you still have your negatives in your pocket so you can return to the lab to get them developed again using different settings if you want.
Now that you have your printed images you are free to do what you want with them. My analogy is going to break down a bit here, but let’s say you want to draw a moustache on someone’s face on your printed image. You get out your pen and draw on the image (this is like using edit mode). After drawing the moustache on the image you start thinking "I really wish this image was brighter, I’m going to go back to the photo lab to re-develop the image with some brighter settings". This is the point at which you are considering going from Edit to Develop mode. In reality, you can’t bring a printed picture with a moustache drawn on it back to the photo lab and ask them to brighten it. The only way you can re-develop the image is to bring in your negative and ask them to develop the image brighter this time. Obviously you are going to have to abandon the moustache you drew on the image and start from scratch.
Using the process tools you can tweak your images and even save some you didn’t think were all that good. This really helps if you aren’t the best photographer. Before & After I did some tweaking in Develop Mode.
Sharing photos:
In addition, they added a new tool to ftp your images to a site. So this may be beneficial for some digital scrapbookers. You can upload from ACDSee to the following sites: Smugmug, Flickr, Zenfolio and ACDSee’s new online album.
Organizing aspect:
And I have to finish this up with Organizing aspect of ACDSee Pro 3 because so many of us use ACDSee products primarily as their image organizer for digital scrapbooking. I know the question I will hear will be does ACDSee Pro 3 introduce any new features that will help us with organizing digital scrapbooking supplies. Unfortunately, ACDSee Pro 3 new features focused on image editing/processing of images. There was very little change in any organizing features. The minor changes are in the organize pane:
Category Icons are gone
They removed the icons for the categories in the Organize pane. This now requires me to read the categories and figure out what category I am in instead of glancing an icon. I miss the icons.
ACDSee 2009:
ACDSee 3.0: 
Assigned Flags are gone as well as Multi-select boxes but you can assign a category by checking a box in Organize pane.
In previous versions there were little assigned category flags signaled that if an image or multiple images were selected which categories or you could tell which sub-categories were assigned. (See screenshot of ACDSee 2009 to see what I am trying to explain.) There also were little boxes that were multi-select boxes that allowed you check multiple boxes for searching on multiple things. Both the flags UPDATE: & multi-select boxes are gone in ACDSee 3.
ACDSee 2009: 
The new boxes in ACDSee 3 now allow you to assign or un-assign categories by checking a box in the Organize pane (previously checking a box could only be done in the Properties Pane.)
Instead of the multi-select boxes, to select multiple categories for a search in ACDSee 3, you need to select your first category, hold down the CTRL key and select the second or more categories. (Definitely not as intuitive as the multi-select box.) UPDATE (or use the blue & gray pointers on the left.)
There are also new blue & gray pointers on the left. Not sure if grey/blue pointers add much at all. I can already tell what is selected because the whole row is in blue. UPDATE. The pointer are multi-select boxes that disappeared from above. They are now arrows instead of boxes.
ACDsee 3.0 
But as with all of ACDSee products, the best way to figure out if the product is right for you is to TRY it out. All of ACDSee’s products have a free full working version for 30 days.
Download your free 30 day trial of ACDSee Pro 3 now!
Some of my tips from over at ACDSee Home Blog
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Save those pictures!! This is an article that is more general rather than ACDSee specific. It covers some basic suggestions on ways to backup your images.
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And some ACDSee related tips:
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Viewing & Working with PDF files with ACDSee
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Using Filter By in ACDSee Photo Manager
Some Current Shutterfly Sales
Save 20% off gift tags. See site for more details. Offer valid from 08.20.09 to 09.01.09
Create a youth sports share site, get a free 11×14 collage poster. See site for more details. Offer valid from 8.11.09 to 9.30.09.
Want to use Twitter but don’t know where to start or how to get involved?
Everyone’s twittering, why aren’t you?? Do you feel that way?
Getting started with twitter is probably the hardest part of twittering. When you twitter you want someone to listen (your followers) and want to hear the conversation of others (who you follow.) When you first sign up for twitter it is like standing in the middle of group of strangers and you hear random comments and no one can hear your comments. So you need to increase your followers and follow people but how?
Here’s my simple way..
- First figure out what interests you. Hobbie: Scrapbooking? Gardening? Technology: Wordpress? etc…
- Many people twitter on a certain subject they use hash tags. It’s like labeling the twitter comment with a subject. There are tons of hashtags but try find a hash tag for one or a few of the interests above. Here’s a great site for doing that. hashtags.org A hint is digital scrapbookers are using #digiscrap for their hashtag.
- Now search for that #hashtag at search.twitter.com and listen to the conversation.
- As you see people twittering about things that interest you.. Follow them. Click on their name and click Follow. Keep doing that and you gain people to listen to in your own “conversation stream.”
- Now to get followers, start talking about things that interest you. People will start following you if they like your content. If you don’t twitter you won’t increase your followers.
- In addition, follow your followers and see what they have to say. (Be careful though, some are just spewing junk. Unfollow the bad ones..)
Now there are other ways.. but I think with my method, you get a nice conversation to follow on subjects that interest you.
One of the other ways to find friends is using Twitter directories: feel free to read about them some of them: Find ‘Em On Twitter: 15 Twitter Directories Compared and here: 14 Twitter directories to find new friends
very, very disappointed with Inkubook service
Table of contents for Inkubook book experience
- Creating a book at Inkubook
- Inkubook photo book is printed and on its way…
- My Inkubook order has arrived and its really cute!
- very, very disappointed with Inkubook service
I like to save up my printing services and print multiple books to save on shipping and handling. DON”T try this with Inkubook!
It turns out that if you order different books that you are forced to pay shipping and handling on each different book order. I ordered and then talked to customer service. They said that is the way it is and it is something that they would like to change in the future but can’t be done now.
Their help statement:
7. If I’ve made more than one book can I order copies of each of them at the same time?
If you’ve made more than one book with Inkubook, you’ll need to order each book separately. Because each book is printed at the time it is ordered instead of being plucked off a shelf of pre-printed books, each book must be prepared and tracked separately. It’s like getting a made-to-order outfit instead of buying something off the rack.
They told me if I would have talked to them beforehand, they would have given me a coupon code for shipping and handling.. No where does it state in that help, the offer to talk to them first for shipping and handling discounts.
Anyway, extremely disappointed in Inkubook and customer service. They seemed unable to do much or offer to help.