Bernskiold Media

Late Tipster Tuesday

There are a lot of sites on the web close to being too many to find. Here I share four that’s just generally cool.

• NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) is the first place I start up (apart from my own sites) and check in on the member forums to see what is going on. I just love the place and could rave about it for long. It’s great folks from start to finish. 
   
• Photography Corner is one of the more amazing photography forums I’m visiting and it’s just great all over. From contests to the comments and the members. I’ve learnt so much there over the years that I can’t recommend it enough.
   
• Another great site is CSS-Tricks where you can get a lot of great CSS tricks and learn how to do everything really in a good way using CSS.
   
• The final tip here would be to go and check out the Lexar Digital Photography site section where you can find tips and tutorials from leading photographers in the world.

That’s it from me today and I’m signing off now and going to bed to enjoy another nice day tomorrow! The shot above is also from today’s mini-hike!

Calibrate your screen day!

Today my friends is an important day, or as I very recently realised, a very important day! Today is the calibrate your screen day. Wait you might say, I didn’t know this existed? Well it didn’t until I just invented it. Here’s the story.

I’ve never really been that big on screen calibration and mainly seen it as a thing that would just cost me money for not that visible results and so I never really tried it or anything, just dismissed because of the cost. Now however, yesterday, I got to try the calibration deal with a Spyder3 Elite that we have in the store where I work and man did it do a difference! I mean even at my laptop screen, yes, my glossy, low-qual MacBook screen it made a big difference. I’m now totally hooked up on this and going to order my own Spyder3 and make sure I calibrate my screen and colour manage all more properly than I’ve done before. It’s something I never really started to learn because I did dismiss it without seeing the difference!

As it should be, all because I am psyched up about it, today becomes the ”Calibrate your screen day” and be sure to see more things on screen calibration soon when I get up and running.

Late Night Thursday Update

It’s long weekend here in Sweden because we are celebrating the midsummer time. It’s always fun even though it seems like we are getting the sucky and pretty common, rain! I’m not taking any days off work and blogging because I’m behind, but I will be going away for the weekend, from Saturday through Sunday, with net and computer

• Apple has announced today that the iTunes Music Store has sold a total of five billion songs over the years, which is a pretty big achievement. Many congrats to Apple on their milestone.
   
• If you are editing a lot of CSS code you might be interested in a CSS Code Editor. The guys over at Smashing Magazine have tested a few of the available ones and come up with a nice test on their website.
   
• Who doesn’t like the Adobe Exchange? You can get a lot of cool stuff for most of the Adobe CS apps on there. However, a new addition is that there is a new category available, all for Lightroom. So if you like presets etc. visit the Lightroom Exchange.

It’s the Wednesday News

It’s once again Wednesday and it’s hard working weeks here with a lot of stuff coming soon which I’ll be talking about in another post here, really soon, I promise you. But we do have some news for today as well:

• Dave Cross posted on his blog today about a cool company that makes embroidered shirts and more. Unlike many other companies, this one only requires you to print four shirts as a minimum. Their name is Queensboro and well, they sound really cool. So if you want to check it out, go to the Queensboro homepage. Clicking on the link above gives Dave and his barbershop quartet a referral credit if you order. The reason for the post is because I do support them.
   
• Each week over att Scott Kelby’s blog he features a guest blogger on Wednesdays. This week it is time for famous portrait and wedding photographer David Ziser to enter the stage…err…blog. He’s talking about what it takes to be a complete wedding photographer. Give it a read!
   
• I realise that it was a while ago since I posted some inspiration here on the blog so I thought we’d cap off this Wednesday with a link to an incredible photographer that I found on the NAPP Portfolios. His name is Mike Doran and shoots sports photography and has some true beauties in his portfolios. 

Wednesday News Stuff

It’s a split day today, school is over for this time for me and a nice summer is awaiting. However because of the grade I’m now graduating from (our school system is different here) I’ll not go with almost anyone from my old class now that we all move up. A little sad to not see half of the people but I’ll all get over it. Onto the news.

• On Monday, Steve Jobs mentioned in the keynote very briefly that Apple is beginning to seed a developer version of the new Snow Leopard that will be replacing Leopard in the next year. It’s going to be much of a performance update with fewer new features. What we have learnt now from seeing the system requirements is that they will be dropping the PowerPC support to go to Intel only now.
   
• Today you’ll definitely want to check out the guest blogger over at Scott Kelby’s blog, Moose Peterson. He’s one of the best wildlife photographers I’ve ever seen and I love his wildlife work. Give his entry a read.
   
• Are you wanting to go the the Photokina in Colonge coming up on September 23rd through 27th? Then you might want to enter the contest from ThinkTankPhoto where you can win a trip complete with hotel stay and $500 in spending money. Just go to the contest site and read through the rules and enter if you are elgible.
   
• If you are interested in all the happenings at the WWDC Keynote you can view it either online or download the podcast.

Friday News Goodies

Some news goodies from today to get us in the weekend spirit as always

• Over at his blog, John Nack has posted about coming Photoshop UI updates that will mainly affect us Mac users, giving us a choice to use an application frame, meaning all panels etc. will be covered in one window instead of being stuck to the sides of the screen. Luckily they are going to make it an option to use it or not which is definitely good.
   
• If you are thinking about purchasing a Mac Pro from Apple you should watch out so you don’t happen to order a lot of video cards thinking that you are ordering a higher speed. Terry White had a post on his blog about this and you should give it a read to be aware of what you are ordering.
   
• Coming up this coming week, starting on Monday is the Apple WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) 2008! What we are all expecting is of course a 3G iPhone and a new .Mac service as well as the hidden goodies that they usually manage to come out with. I’m for one looking forward to see what they come up with. It’s a bummer though that I can’t be following the keynote through live posts, I have a end of the year ball to attend that evening, so I’ll recap all afterwards.
   
• Some weekend fun as well and it’s time to get Simpsonized again. Visit the SimpsonizeMe website to get all yellow according to your wish and then you can go and compile your family in Photoshop

My top 5 list of WordPress Plugins

There are quite a few plugins that this site couldn’t live without and that I’m really glad exist. I’m going to share my top list of WordPress plugins, big or small doesn’t matter here so even if they do just one little thing, it might be a thing that I really like and makes running the site much easier.

cformsII
This is really one of these big and glorious plugins that does make your life easier as well. cforms is the plugin powering the contact form on the site and it is really a truly amazing free plugin. It lets you manage the forms you need (how many you need) and with ease style them and insert more complex features.

All in One SEO Pack
This plugin is the reciept for google sucess. I’m really serious. If you have a WordPress blog and you want more control over description and keywords on your post, this one is for you.

StatPress
The master of statistics on your blog I really say this is. StatPress collects visitor information including all the detailed fun stuff you’d want to see as well as the simple visitor and referrer stats. Just choose the way you want to view it, StatPress collects it all for you in any case!

Plugin Central
This is a really different but cool plugin. It lets you quickly and easily install plugins from your dashboard without needing to download files to your computer and upload through FTP. It’s a really fast way to install new plugins. I just wish it had the ability to remove them also if needed.

Dean’s FCKEditor for WordPress
This plugin replaces the default WordPress editor with the lot more advanced FCK Editor! It works like a charm and makes posting a lot more feature rich.

Wednesday News Stuff

One would think it would be very hard to exceed the happy news from yesterday with the cool CS4 betas and the news that the iPhone is coming here to Sweden. There are however some pretty cool stuff running today as well!

• Backing up is really important to do and yesterday Scott Kelby posted his backup stratergy on his blog which is really a good one. Last Friday he had another post about backing up and the importance of doing do (sharing a nightmare story) and I call today another backup Wednesday because it is really important!
   
• About a week ago the talented artist James Quantz Jr. redesigned his site to make it much cleaner and simpler (and more stylish) to us viewers. I really think it turned out rather nicely and I think you should all go and look at his new site if not just to sit a while in awe to look at his work!
   
• If you’ve been paying attention to this site a bit recently you’ll have noticed a little change in the sidebar and overall width of the site. I’ve expended the width so I could fit a larger sidebar with two columns instead of extending the old one to be even longer. With it I also added some new sidebar content such as a twitter summary of my twitter page and a brand new poll and countdown. Some minor new cool things
   
• If you are trying to download trials from Adobe’s website you’ll be greeted with a not so nice statement that they are unavailable. Over at InDesignSecrets you can read what you can do and why this is happening.

It is Tuesday-day!

Well today is indeed Tuesday and adding some corny titles to it, we end up with Tuesday-day, the day which really is Tuesday. Just arrived home after being at the doctors taking a blood test to find out if I’m allergic or not, unfortunately I bleed easily so the nurse had to try twice, once in each arm because the first vain broke. Anyway I’m all good and now I just need to wait for the results and just take the pills when I get symptoms. Anyway, that’s enough about me and onto the news!

• Firstly, I’m taking a minute to wish one of my best friends a very happy birthday!! You know who you are and have the best birthday possible!
   
• Yesterday I released a brand new starting episode of the Creative Suite Tips and Tricks Podcast. It’s great to be back and you can view the InDesign tutorial on the podcast site. Also released are two new tutorials here on the site, Create HDR Photos Part 1 & Part 2.
   
• If you are a user of iWorks and specifically Pages you probably want to check out the list of templates for Pages from Jumsoft. They are available from there for only $29 and are of great quality. They also have other templates for other applications.
   
• Trying to get a job? Just got a job and want to make sure you handle it? Over at A List Apart today they’ve posted an article today called Why Did you Hire me?. It gives you some tips on what you do when you just get a job with negotiations etc. Give it a read!

Professional Portrait Retouching Class by Scott Kelby

Today on Kelby Training a brand new class (like most weeks) are launched. This time however it is an amazing class by an amazing man. Scott Kelby is launching his brand new online class called Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques. It’s going to teach you the best ways to retouch your portraits, without making them look unreal or overdone. It’s all the real retouching stuff used by professionals worldwide every day. After the jump you can see a promotional video that Scott did for the class where he himself explains what is covered.

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