Wiki Public Domain Image Resources: This was a great site, although I could have frittered away an entire day going to all the links for various public domain images. One link I liked in particular was for “America as it was,” a collection of vintage postcards. I love all the early Americana type of stuff.
LibrarySpot.com Image Resources: Definitely not as useful a site as the one above. You can search by theme, collection, etc. but I liked that the wiki site, unlike this one, was very specific with their headings and noted which links led to web sites with only public domain inages. I think that for the sake of efficiency, libraryspot is not as user-friendly.
Read Write Web: This site confused me a little, in that I don’t see how it is a resource for images. It is self-described as being a technology blog and I read though quite a few of the postings, reads the backgrounds for the contributing staff, and went through several of the pages. It certainly has a very clean, bold look with the use of red, white, and black and the blog postings seemed to be about pretty cutting-edge topics. But I still have to admit that I did not quite understand why it was relevant to this week’s lesson.
Footnote.com: I probably could have spent hours going through this site. It is a giant repository for archived documents and you can browse by topic, time period, keyword, name, etc. It is very easy to navigate through. You do have to sign up as a member to have free range of the site and there is a fee associated, although there is a free membership with less access available. To someone whose dream job is to work in the National Archives, this is a really neat site.
Adobe Photoshop: I’ve never used Photoshop myself but I saw a really interesting video on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcFlxSlOKNI) that gives n idea of what is possible with this program. The adobe site has plenty of help in the way of tutorials, etc. This is not software I would have any business owning, however. I’d be photoshopping practically every single photo of me in existence.
Adobe Fireworks: This program confuses me a little, even though I read the information on the web site and the FAQ section pretty thoroughly. If I understand it correctly, fireworks is a graphics program that lets you design/optimize graphics, which you would then turn around and import into dreamweaver for use in a web site. There was a real emphasis on the fact that fireworks makes this a streamlined process regardless of what kind of device (computer, smart phone, etc.) you’re designing for. I guess I would never use this unless I were a professional web designer and wanted to create my own graphics.
Gimp: I recall looking a this website earlier in the semester, but I didn’t realize until going over it again how much you can actually do with your images using this. And it’s FREE! Ok, so maybe I can touch up some of my less-than-perfect photos without shelling out $600 for Photoshop.
GimpShop: Still a free version of the gimp software, but this one is made to look and work like photoshop; evidently you can actually learn to use it by doing photoshop tutorials. The most interesting piece of information I got from this site was a Harvard study that was noted and apparently came to the conclusion that open source software should in theory be of better quality that proprietary software since more people are able to contribute to and refine it. Cool.