Free Photo Stock for your designs!!!

You might have noticed that I have not been posting here on my blog lately. Started the year off finding out that I am being laid off from the print shop I have been working for the last 35 years. Happy New Year and you are being laid off!!! The shop has merged with a larger printing company and everyone is being let go except the sales people. BUT, I am still as of this day working there as they have been of need of my skills. Eventually they will lay me off but they would like to hire me here and there for freelance work and I should be getting three months severance pay. Hurray!

So, I have been busy over on Linkedin writing articles and posting graphic design samples to show off some of my graphic design skills. I have been using Affinity Publisher which is a Adobe InDesign alternative, I highly recommend it. And I been using Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator alternatives. In my design samples, I have been using photos from a few great FREE stock sites I like to recommend.

First is Unsplash, I love this stock site. Browse to find a photo you want to use, double click the photo to open it up and click the free download button in the upper right corner. Also, I recommend checking out Pexels and Pixabay, both also are great free stock sites that you might find the images you need for your design projects. And you do not need to create an account to download the images.

Below are a couple of publications in which I use images I found on this sites and I posted to my Linkedin page.

#photostock #graphicdesign #affinitypublisher

Remembering Paul Walker

Being a big fan of the Fast & Furious films, November 30 is always a sad for FF fans like myself. On November 30, 2013, actor Paul Walker died in a fiery car crash. He was the original Fast & Furious character in the films and major character in the films (not including FF3). When read about him, he comes as a guy who was kind and cared about others. He doesn't come off as a big famous snobby actor but someone who is down to earth. So as a remembrance of Paul Walker, I create a image to post to social media using only Affinity Photo.

EDITING
After finding a photo of Paul behind the steering wheel from a scene from one of the films, I placed it into a 1080 x 1080 pixels document. Next, I added a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and desaturated the image to take out the color to give me a black and white image to work with. I added a Black and White adjustment layer to adjust only his eyes to bring out some of the contrast. Next came a black rectangle at the bottom of the image and applied a gradient to fade the black rectangle. This is where I placed the text using the font Antique Olive Std Nord Italic which I was able to find on the internet (luckily for free). I needed to add some contrast to the image so I added a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer and a Shadows/Highlights adjustment layer to darken the shadows. Then I used the Inpainting Brush Tool to remove some parts of the image where his cheeks meet the steering wheel. A Lens Filter adjustment was used to add a little bit of color to his face to finally finish off the image.

So, there is the finish work!

#photoediting #affinityphoto #paulwalker #fastandfurious

FINAL IMAGE 

WORKING IN AFFINITY PHOTO

ORIGINAL IMAGE I STARTED WITH

Cover Design: The Classics

Last week, Serif released Affinity Publisher, a alternative document layout application to Adobe's InDesign. The application is the latest in their lineup of applications that gives designers, photographers and other creative people a chose that does not require a subscription. Other applications from Serif include Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, and each application cost only $50 each with free updates. I have all three applications and impress at how fast they run and I can basically almost do everything I would do in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign. Publisher is missing some things that InDesign has, wish they had a packaging feature and separation previewer. But hopefully Serif will add those features in a later update. So, I am taking Affinity Publisher for a spin by designing a magazine cover for fun.

You can find Affinity Publisher at this link:
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/

#affinitypublisher #design #coverdesign