lesa's blog

When it comes to showing off your pictures and movies, nothing beats a great slideshow, and the ones you can craft in Photos for Mac are gorgeous. You can also export a saved slideshow project as a movie in order to share it with others. However, the way you share exported slideshow movies depends on the capability of your recipient. Do they have a computer? Do they have an Apple TV? Do they have a DVD or Blu-ray video player? Will you be there in person with an iOS device? In this column, you’ll learn strategies for each of these situations. Click here to read the full story on Macworld.com

My book The Skinny on Holiday Photo Gifts is now available on Apple's iBooks Store, as well as in PDF and EPUB format! Click here for sample pages, a detailed description, or to buy the book.

’Tis the season to print your photography, whether it’s a picture you’ll frame, a greeting card, or a calendar, book or other photo-related project you’ll order online. Since it’s challenging (if not impossible) to print some of this stuff at home, it’s best to leave the printing to pros such as Apple (using iPhoto or the Photos app), services such as mpix.com, your local camera store, or even Costco.

XChange posted another 22 of my favorite Photoshop tips, along with helpful illustrations. These are just some of the real-world tips and techniques from my Photoshop video trainings and Photoshop books. Enjoy the tips here. For the past 23 years XChange US and XChange UK have been our go-to sources for information and products that improve efficiency. Whether you work with color, design, multimedia, or print and publishing, they're happy to help you find the ideal product or solution for your particular need.

Make memorable and personalized gifts using your own photos! This step-by-step $5.99 book helps you create myriad gifts such as Pillows, Tote bags, Purses, Magnets & stickers, Canvas prints, Skins for laptops and portable devices, Postage stamps, Mugs, Keychains, Playing cards, Tree ornaments, Dry-erase calendars, Notepads, and Wine and beer bottle labels. You’ll also learn how to create spectacular cards and personalized calendars in Apple’s Photos for Mac and iPhoto. Then, you’ll learn step-by-step instructions for creating unique, do-it-yourself projects such as photo napkin rings, photo gift tags and wooden photo cubes. Along the way, you’ll also learn many valuable tips for improving the overall look of your projects, including: adjusting the color of your photos so they harmonize together, how to save your files for successful printing, the best ways to add text to photos, how to remove color from parts of your photo, and unusually impressive card designs.

There’s nothing like printing your own photography, though adorning your walls with your own art can be intimidating. A safe way to print—and thus enjoy—your digital memories is to create a calendar in Photos for OS X. At 13 by 10.4 inches, Apple’s calendars are big and printed on thick, high-quality paper so they look better than the ones you get anywhere else.

Make A Website Hub posted a cheat sheet on Facebook image sizes, updated for 2015.
It includes image dimensions for your Facebook cover photo, profile picture, ads, events, apps, and more. I'm going to keep it handy for the next time we update our Facebook pages!
(Thanks to DesignTaxi for pointing this out!)

One of Apple Photos’ most powerful features for tagging pictures is keywords. They let you apply any number of descriptive words such as “food,” “vacation,” “kickboxing,” or “kitties” to your images and videos. By searching for text included in the keywords you apply—using the search field or a smart album—you can locate specific pictures and videos quickly, regardless of which album, moment, collection, or year they’re in. Since Apple hasn’t yet seen fit to include a star-rating system in Photos (even in version 1.2), keywords may become your new best friend.

XChange posted another 22 of my favorite Photoshop tips, along with helpful illustrations. These are just some of the real-world tips and techniques from my Photoshop video trainings and Photoshop books. Enjoy the tips here. For the past 23 years XChange US and XChange UK have been our go-to sources for information and products that improve efficiency. Whether you work with color, design, multimedia, or print and publishing, they're happy to help you find the ideal product or solution for your particular need.

With rapidly expanding image and video collections, three things are hot on everyone’s wish list: constant and automatic backups to an offsite location, having your entire image and video library available on all your devices, and having the edits you make to an image on one device show up on your other devices. Both Apple Photos and Google Photos offer these insanely great, sanity-saving features, but how do the apps really stack up?