Blue Vertigo

 

home page of Blue Vertigo

Many designers develop a list of their favorite resources and tab them for quick reference. Certain sites are great for stock images, (like IstockPhoto), there are great free resource sites (like Dafont.com for free fonts), or even small utilities online like a color wheel generator to help you choose complimentary colors for website design. You can spend a good deal of time developing a refining your list of favorites on your web browser but sometimes you just feel like parusing the web for great new images to use or different looking textures. One site I have run across that has provided me with numerous resources for graphics is Blue Vertigo. This site has links full of stock photos, commercial photos, video footage, vector clipart, fonts, great corporate logos (when you need to hunt down a good vector copy of Visa/Master Card), sound files, Photoshop brushes, Poser downloads, icons and other goodies. I like to go through and build up new resources to bookmark and believe me, this site has plenty to look and choose from. They even offer a newsletter that will keep you updated when new sites are posted. Some of the photo websites they show are a fresh search for me and allow me to place out of the ordinary images in my projects. Give this website a look and I'm sure you will realize the value of having Blue Vertigo listed among your favorites.

Alien Skin's Bokeh

 

Original Image (top)

Focus changed with Bokeh (bottom)

Alien Skin software has been a favorite of mine for quite some time offering professional plug-in packages for Photoshop, such as Eye Candy and Xenofex (see my past post for a review on Eye Candy 6). Once again they come up with a great little utility to help you enhance your digital images with the plug-in Bokeh. It's one of those don't always need it but when you need it, there's nothing else like it helper tools. In the past whenever I wanted to draw emphasis on the foreground subject matter I would mask off the foreground, feather the selection, invert it and add a gaussian blur. The results would work sometimes, but the control over the depth of field look was rather limited. With Bokeh, you get a great interface that comes with a long list of preset blurs to simulate the look of a Canon or Sony lens, or allow you to adjust and save your own settings for other projects. Caution must be used with Bokeh however, as one tends to be given too much control and before you know it, the foreground subject matter you selected seems to 'pop' off that page a bit too much. This plug-in is great for sports images or food product shots in a natural background setting. You can even add some vignette to the image to help give a more realistic blend to your masked selection. 

Demo copies of Bokeh can be downloaded from their website. The price for Bokeh, when weighed against trying to reshoot an image, may be worth the money to invest in this great tool for electronic photo manipulation.