Editors of top photography blog reveal their best money-making tips in 340-page book now available on Amazon.

New York, New York (PRWEB) June 9, 2009 — Photopreneur, the photography Web site (http://blogs.photopreneur.com) offering information and resources to help photographers make the leap from artist to entrepreneur, has released its first book, “99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos.” The 340-page softcover book is available on Amazon and by visiting the Photopreneur site at http://blogs.photopreneur.com/99-ways-to-make-money-from-your-photos.

Packed with insider tips, practical strategies, and case studies, “99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos” shares 99 creative ways to make images that generate cash. Each chapter reveals what to shoot, how to break in, and where to go to generate sales. Readers will learn how to sell stock, approach galleries, host their own exhibitions, earn money with Flickr, shoot for social networking sites, create and market photo products, form joint ventures, upsell their event photography and much, much more.

From beginners to enthusiasts and from hobbyists to professionals, “99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos” (http://blogs.photopreneur.com/99-ways-to-make-money-from-your-photos) can help anyone turn their passion for photography into a reliable source of income.

Leading executives, entrepreneurs and photographers praise the book:

Oleg Tscheltzoff, co-founder and president, Fotolia –

“An excellent guide to both novice and experienced photographers. Whether you’ve just invested in your first digital camera or you’ve got an image library spanning years, this book will give you a step-by-step resource for capitalizing on your images.”

Jeff Beaver, co-founder, Zazzle.com –

“’99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos’ is a great resource for any photographer serious about turning their passion for photography into real money.”

Andreas Reinhold, engineer and freelance car photographer –

“A great guide for those who want to start earning money with their photos. Several of the shown ways to earn money with photography (http://blogs.photopreneur.com) work for me and some of the given hints were new and proved to be successful. This guide is so comprehensive that any photographer should be able to find a good starting point to get his business going.”

Authored by the editors of Photopreneur and published by New Media Entertainment, Ltd., “99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos” has a list price of $34.95.

Note to media and bloggers: Please contact Cathy Baradell if you are interested in a review copy of “99 Ways To Make Money From Your Photos.”

About Photopreneur

Photopreneur is one of the Web’s top photography sites (http://blogs.photopreneur.com/about-the-photo-community), featuring stories, interviews and expert marketing advice. Its editors bring together decades of experience at the highest levels of professional photography. The Photopreneur team combines rigorous research, marketing creativity and a deep understanding of the photography business to help photographers – professional, enthusiast and occasional – earn income from their images. Photopreneur is owned by New York City-based New Media Entertainment, Ltd (http://www.nme.net/). Check out Photopreneur at http://blogs.photopreneur.com.

Manipulated with multiple layers and textures with a gradient fill in Photoshop CS4. Colors are not as true as in photoshop.

Thanks to Pear Biter for allowing his image to be manipulated under Creative Commons www.flickr.com/photos/pearbiter/566128230/

After the last few posts on working with textures in Photoshop CS4, I thought I’d do some searching and share some links for free textures. I do think however, that one should go out an shoot their own texture files to create a unique image of your own vs. using someone else work.

29 Most Useful Texture Packs of 2008 – Has a great selection of links to earth tone and vintage style textures.

31 Most Colorful Collection Of High Quality Free Texture Packs – Another good site that did all the work for you, finding great textures.

Texture King – Currently has 337 free texture files.

40 Excellent Photoshop Tutorials for Textures and Backgrounds – A good source for creating your own textures.

CGTextures.com – This site is huge, but unfortunately it is a paysite, but worth checking out.

I played around with the Seattle image a bit more from this post, adding an image I was able to get through the NASA website. This is a gold mine for texture images and other than for advertising, they are in the public domain.

Check out the NASA gallery and start adding to your texture library.

Tonight I was giving CS4 a good workout and thought I’d work on some portrait images just for fun. These both came out a bit better than I expected and you’ll see in the second image, I added a gradient to neutralize the skin tones as well as some textures on the outer edges. I was also going for a more creamier feel to the skin. Unfortunatly the web image just doesn’t come out with the right tone as a large .PSD file does.

I did a bit more work on the first image above, with Edna, shaping her nose and mouth somewhat but not wanting to make it look unrealistic. I also tried to maintain the skintone and pores when working with the skin which is always a challenge. This work can be tedious and there really is no way around it other than having a great makeup artist and lighting to get it right.

I have been driving around my Macbook Pro with my new version of Photoshop CS4, trying to learn all the little nuances hidden under the hood. Somehow I got sidetracked and ended up at istockphoto.com looking at textures. Don’t ask me how, it just happens when one has a period of boredom, followed by flashes of inspiration and then some temporary forms of ADHD. Anyway, so I did a search on textures as I wanted to work with some layers in Photoshop and play around with some images I shot over the weekend in Seattle. Not having any textures at the ready, I found this one of a tuscan wall that I figured would work perfect. Yeah I had to pay for it, but I wanted it now and did not have my Europe images close by and the time to spend hours hunting for a texture. Besides I I started looking at my old Europe CD’s, I’d end up on some other tangent and never accomplish my goal , so I bought it.

Originally I was going to use and image of Post Alley by the Pike Place Market, but felt that the Seattle image would work a lot  better. In the upper left corner, you can see the original texture file as well as the Seattle photo I used.

So, let’s see step by step how I created this.

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Had a chance to shoot in Seattle this afternoon and thought I’d try shooting some panorama’s. This is 12 images stitched together with a hand held shot at 18 mm on a wide angle Nikon lens. Shutter was at 1/180 with an F6.7 aperture.

When shooting a shot like this with the intention of stitching together, it is important to make sure you are set on manual mode for shutter and aperture. Since I mostly shoot aperture mode, I took a test shot and then read the settings and then moved my camera to manual mode. If I was to do this over, I would have probably shot 24 photos to make sure the lower part of the marina made it into the image.  The aluminum boat in the center was in my initial shots, but you have to crop about a 1/3 of your final results to get a panorama as the stitching is not aligned with the way the frames were shot. I also overlap about 1/3 of the frame to the next, to make sure I don’t miss any details.

Below is one of the original images, flat and boring, so you can see why I needed to add some tweaks.

In Photoshop CS2-CS4, this is real easy to create. Go to File>Automate>Photomerge and choose all the images you want to create the panorama. Click Ok and PS will do the rest. Once I cropped, I then did a few things to get rid of the muted tones as the light was real flat. I created another layer and ran Filter>Other>High Pass. I then set opacity to 30% and fill to 25% with a color dodge screen. This brings out a bit more of the detail in the image. Bumping up the saturation a bit to bring out the color, completed the image.

Photographer Bill Simone steps through some of his workflow in creating the above image. Though I think HDR can be a bit overdone and has become the rage for the past two years or so, but Bill really created a beautiful image without overdoing it. Also check out his Boxer post. This was a great composite image, taking you step by step through the process.

Seeing work like this convinces me I need to use more post processing. I have always been a minimalist when it comes to working my images, because I think the job needs to get done in the camera and not on the desktop. I also fought moving to digital from film and going back to film would be pretty tough at this point. My CS4 upgrade arrives next week, so I guess I’ll need to get to work and get some help from the masters like Bill Simone.

For those of you who love to play with Photoshop, check out this list of my favorite .PSD files. A .PSD file is basically a template that has multiple layers you can customize to create buttons, sample iphones, etc. Most of these should be compatible with Photoshop CS4, but I just ordered my upgrade so am unable to verify.

The Green Planet

This one will be very popular with everyone talking about going green. Download Link

Skateboard Template

This is probably one of the coolest templates I have run across. For those of you who want to design your own skateboard layouts, this will be a perfect template for you. Download Link

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Suggested donation is $10, but feel free to donate what you can afford. A minimum donation of $2.00 is required to help with processing fees. You will be allowed an immediate download of the action, once you complete your donation. Just put this in your actions folder. Search for .atn files if you are unsure where they are located. Also check out this tutorial, if you are still confused.

This is probably my favorite Photoshop action yet. Take a B&W image and create a night vision photo in Photoshop, in less than a minute. This is an easy to run action that introduces you to Lighting Effects, Adding Noise and working with Grain. Just open an image and run the action and it automatically creates a Night Vision image for you. Images below are actual samples created from this Night Vision Action in less than 10 seconds.

Click for immediate download and a simple donation to help me maintain this site.

Sample Images using Terry Divyak's Photoshop Night Vision Action