Imagekind Offers a Lot

This is where I keep my images for customers to view and select for purchase. With a lot of image sharing and selling sites to choose from Imagekind is certainly at the top of my list because of their print standards, as they use top of the line Epson printers. But I recommend them also for their community. Questions are constantly being asked and answered, updates are frequent, and they add improvements much more often now.

And they make it easy for someone viewing your work to comment on it, which if you are there for purposes of selling your art, makes it easier for your sales to increase.

They also have a display feature which allows for near fault-free framing and matting examples as it might appear in your home. If you'll allow here is an example from one of my Galleries where you can look below Buy A Fine Art Print, and click on Buy a Framed Print and Buy a Canvas Print, to discover how this works. And here's that tool.

Imagekind also maintains a blog for artists and offers an incentive program for affiliates. 

So if you are considering a place to move your photos online to, without the extra costs and work of your own domain name and website, consider Imagekind. Even if selling is not your primary goal, though it might likely be once you've been there involved in the community, it is a great place to get feedback and begin a social network for your love of art.

Let me know what you think.


Full disclosure; I am not paid nor compensated in any way for the writing of this article. Other than the sale of prints from my personal Galleries this article is written to promote the general welfare of all artists at Imagekind.

Soft Focus your Photos

Let's take a photo I shot of our cat Rayden. He's slightly large and rather soft looking anyway but we thought we'd like to see an even softer version. So as you can see the original shows quite a lot of the photo in focus save some to the right rear. Understand that for this purpose I am pushing the results to demonstrate how far one can go to get maximum effect. You won't probably go this far, nor would I.

Open your photo in PS, make a background copy, by dragging the background image in the layers pallet down to the create a new layer icon, just to the left of the garbage can, and release. You now see a background copy of your original image. Make sure that copy is still highlighted. Go up to Layer> Layer Mask> Reveal All. Next click on the photo so the mask is not highlighted, but the photo to its left, is highlighted. Then to Filters> Blur> Gaussian Blur and choose a rather high blur so that your brushing out the blur will be obvious. Of course this depends on how it looks when you try this. Now click on the icon mask to the right of the photo, again in the Layers pallet, choose a round brush style with a hardness of 0-10 and a brush size appropriate to your photo size and the area you want to paint back the sharpness area.

Voila you are done. You now should have something approximating the following photo of our cat Rayden. If you have any questions leave them in the Comment section below and if I have time I'll get back to you.

 

By the way, since writing this our cat has passed. So this publishing of this technique comes with some sadness, but we have made the decision to post anyway, partly because of your benefit and partly in remembrance of Rayden.