Jobs Are Out There…But Where?
Impact Magazine: Phoenix Chamber of Commerce
By Tom Trush

Shrinking operating budgets have directed renewed attention to expenses, causing some business owners to bring previously outsourced tasks back in-house. However, that can be risky, especially for companies focused on growth.

“If people who should be growing the business are focusing on the organization, then right off the bat you have a ‘shooting-yourself-in-the-foot scenario’ because they need to be growing the business, not managing the organization,” said Anne Caldwell, president of Phoenix-based human resource strategy firm Outsourcing Solutions.

Caldwell added that one problem is that most small business owners have a difficult time separating tasks related to growth and management. As a result, productivity lags because they are taken away from core responsibilities to complete the tasks brought back in-house.

“A business owner cannot know everything and should not spend time trying to learn everything,” she stressed.

A big reason why Caldwell believes outsourcing will remain strong is people’s desire to hire knowledge. Not only are regulations in industries such as human resources changing constantly, making industry specialists essential, but the expenses involved with hiring an employee are greater than outsourcing.

Although outsourcing is often associated with U.S. companies hiring outside the country, the weak dollar is causing companies based in countries such as the United Kingdom, China and Japan to seek more U.S.-based talent.

Brad Porteus, CMO of Elance, an online workplace that connects businesses with professionals, says non-U.S.-based businesses outsourcing to U.S. service providers outpaced growth in every other segment in the fourth quarter of 2007. Also, the growth rate in offshore businesses hiring on Elance exceeded the growth rate of hiring by U.S. businesses.

A trend seen by venture capitalist Armando Viteri is more movement away from India and development of new outsourcing growth areas.

“Due to the success of the Indian economy in generating demand for knowledge workers to support the domestic economy, and because of the explosive growth of outsourcing to India earlier in the decade, the cost of Indian development labor has skyrocketed,” said Viteri, who is also CEO and president of neubloc, a global software product development outsource provider.

As a result, he added, U.S. companies are experimenting with providers in Asia, Central/Eastern Europe and South America.

It is important to remember that pre-viz renderings are meant to be a communication tool.

Designers should create lighting renderings that give a general feel for certain moments.

Digital lighting renderings should not be exact representations of what the actual lighting will look like, but they SHOULD be based in reality.

My advice to lighting rendering artists is to keep in mind “where” the actual lighting fixtures will be and “how” they will be focused. Also be mindful of the type of fixtures that might be used.

As a lighting artist you never want to create renderings that are completely impossible to achieve, or light, because if a director or architect sees that rendering and likes it, you’d better be able to actually make it happen.

Lighting renderings are also a wonderful way for designers to explore different options. While working on different lighting cues you might accidentally find an effect or look that you hadn’t previously thought of before.

Read more about digital lighting renderings here.

Check out my “Brush Border: Photo Mask Tutorial” for detailed instructions on how to use these masks.

Mask #1

Mask #2

Mask #3

Mask #4

(Please note, reselling or redistributing these masks without Wildcat Digital’s permission is not allowed.)

Choose the image that you want to apply the mask to and make any cropping adjustments. I’ll be using this photo:

Add a layer mask.  The layer should reveal two thumbnails like below.

Choose the mask you will be working with.  Don’t worry if the mask isn’t the same size as the image we will adjust the size later.  Select>All and then Copy.  I’ll be using this mask.

Once back in the image you will be using, Alt Click (Windows) or Option Click (Mac) on the mask layer.  Your image should disappear to reveal a white background.  Now Paste the mask.  At this point, you can resize the mask image to the proper dimensions.

Once you have the mask sized properly, invert the mask layer by choosing Image > Adjustments > Invert.

To make sure that your image shows through the mask clearly, adjust the levels to make the mask pure black and pure white. Choose Image > Adjustments > Levels and pull in the right and left sliders like below.

The last step is to Alt Click (Windows) or Option Click (Mac) on the image layer to reveal your newly cropped image!

FINAL IMAGE

Download 4 Free Masks by clicking here.

 iStockphoto Photography Standards: Lighting
By: Matjaž Slanič

Lighting is probably the single most important aspect of photography, and is a huge topic. Every picture you take depends on good light. Mastering the basics of photographing a well-lit subject will help make your images useful for designers in everyday applications. When you know the basics, you can begin to explore the more dramatic possibilities of light: how the angle, power, and warmth of light effects your subject, stimulates emotions, and expresses your creativity.

Understanding light is a lifelong project. For beginning photographers, the key subjects are:

• Proper exposure
• Using and adapting to different light sources (natural and artificial)
• White balance
• Unexpected problems: Lens flares, reflections, and chromatic abberation

Let’s explore these topics by looking at a few examples that aren’t acceptable for our standards: shots that cannot find their warm home at iStock and need more technical improvement before being accepted into collection.

See the rest of the article here: http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=524

ActionCentral: The Photoshop Action Exchange http://atncentral.com/download.htm 

This site has quite a few actions that are available to download for free. 

In addition to this and other free sites, there are action sets out there available for purchase that do some pretty awesome things. If you use Photoshop often and need to make image adjustments for either personal or professional use, I would suggest you check out all of your options. It would be worth your time.

BrushEezy

 http://www.brusheezy.com/brushes 

has hundreds of free brushes that are a really great addition to your arsenal of tools. While I am a huge fan of iStockphoto it can get very expensive paying for vector images to use as backgrounds. Some of these photoshop brushes are fantastic for just that–using as background images, or whatever you would like.  While the brushes are free, many of the contributers only ask for links to the work.

My advice is to visit a forum. There are so many talented people out there who love to share their knowledge, why shouldn’t you?  When I was working on my graduate thesis in Flash I started getting heavily involved in a forum where I found that nine times out of ten my questions were answered by very knowledgeable friendly people. 

It’s been many years since that time, and while I’m still a true believer in forums, I found, what I believe to be, the mother-of-all forums. I’ve seen the forum before. It’s called:

 Experts Exchange

 http://www.experts-exchange.com  

I used to scoff at them because they charge to use their services, and see replies to questions that have been asked. But I sucked it up when I finally asked a question on a forum that no one could answer, and I signed up for a free seven day trial.  I very skeptically posted my question and waited. Only 17 minutes later my question was answered. I was floored. I decided I shouldn’t be too impressed–that it may have been an anomaly that my question had been answered so quickly and concisely, so I asked another question, and the same thing happened again.

Not only is response time lightening fast, but Experts Exchange has useful tool that let’s users validate answers when they are proven to work. This way, it’s easy to see which answers properly fixed the problem.  Since membership isn’t free, this probably isn’t something that you would want to renew all the time, but for projects that might take a month or so to complete paying for one month’s worth of service might be worth it. While only being able to see answers might not be worth the subscription, the ability to ask a question is.