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Photoshop Tutorials – The Use of Layers
Adobe Photoshop is unarguably the most widely used image editing application in the world. With its intuitive layout and great feature set, it has carved out a niche for itself over time. Photoshop is used by plenty of people for different purposes, ranging from photographers to web designers. It is a robust application with many features, one of which is the immensely helpful layers function. It is a very powerful feature which allows users to make non-destructive changes to an image, and can be stacked on top of each other to permit extensive modifications to an existing image.
How do layers work?
Layers work like transparent sheets placed on top of an image. In Photoshop, layers can be stacked on top of each other, and changes can be applied to any one layer independent of the others. They can be modified, drawn on, processed and deleted without affecting anything else in the image. The individual layers can be easily accessed from the layer palette, and it is easy to add, move and delete layers.
Practical application of layers
Very basic use of layers include actions such as adding text content to a picture, and stacking pictures together to create collages or montages. Layers are also useful in conjunction with what Adobe calls the masking tool to selectively hide or reveal parts of the image underneath. Users can vary the opacity and control how the layer blends into the layers underneath, and this makes it a very powerful editing too. The entire look and feel of images can be altered significantly by using this combination of layers and masks. It is a powerful editing tool used by both professionals and casual users to create finished and impactful images.
Another very widely used layer function is called the adjustment layer. Adjustment layers are special layers which can be placed on top of an image to make changes of adjustments to various inherent properties of the image. With the use of adjustment layers, users can change characteristic properties like brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, color warmth levels, color depth etc. This has widespread application in basic and advanced photo editing, and can even be used to convert color photos into rich black and white images. Adjustment layers can also be stacked on top of each other to carry out individually exclusive adjustments.
As is apparent, the layers function is an important part of Adobe Photoshop that can be an excellent tool in the hands of a good designer. However one should keep in mind that applying layers does lead to loss of detail, which cannot be undone again.
What role does your Logo play in your Branding Strategy?
Though logo may not be the only component of your branding strategy, it certainly is a very critical component. Logo assumes a lot of importance in brand building because logo is an impactful visual representation. As a rule, people find it easier to remember a visual image rather than the name of a company or a marketing message.
Before embarking on the process of logo creation, try to evolve and put in place your brand strategy. The prime mission of your logo is to reflect the values, objectives and the business philosophy of your company. Make it a point to effectively convey all these pertinent information to your logo designer.
Your logo design must look not only appealing but also truly professional for it to help your branding strategy. Your logo must have a strong relevance to your brand if you want your branding strategy to succeed.
The ability to remain distinct and the ability to be remembered easily by prospects is indeed an essential factor in branding strategy. A company’s logo remarkably fulfills both the criteria. Logo is a visual symbol that can provide your customers with instant brand recognition of your business and the products that you market.
All your sales promotion materials including your brochure, pamphlets, trade ads, website, social media channels, signage and business stationery should carry you logo. This is absolutely necessary as your logo must receive utmost publicity if you want your customers to remember your logo and identify it with your brand.
Marketing experts recommend that your entire branding strategy should revolve around your logo. As your logo becomes increasingly familiar to your customers and prospects, your brand awareness will grow. Succinctly stated, the logo is the essence and the visual face of what your brand represents.
In view of the pivotal role a logo plays in branding strategy, you must accord your logo creation all the care and attention it deserves. Do not design your logo using some online easy-do-it yourself methods and make the logo look cheap and forgetful. Creating a logo calls for deep understanding of your business culture and values and highly specialized creativity and skills.
When a logo is aesthetically designed and attention-grabbing, its value to brand owners becomes high. Logos that are instantly recognized and easily understood can lend tremendous support for your branding efforts. Logos may be best defined as a visual image of a company’s mission and vision and the cornerstone of its branding strategy.
How Small Businesses can use LinkedIn to Recruit?
One distinct advantage of LinkedIn and other social media sites is small businesses can gainfully use them for recruiting of employees. People on LinkedIn have contacts that keep asking them to refer potential employees.
In view of this, several hundred prospective employees profile themselves on LinkedIn each year. It is no longer required for small businesses to post job vacancies on online employment agencies as social media is able to more efficiently help small businesses with recruitment of employees.
In fact, small businesses are often spammed with hundreds of resumes from unqualified applicants when they approach online employment agencies. However, small businesses can continue to use job agencies as a part of their recruiting mix to identify the best talent.
Here are some ways how LinkedIn can be effectively used by small businesses for recruitment:
- LinkedIn users may create and gradually expand a network of professionals. The prospective employer will then send a request for a referral of a suitable candidate for a particular job opening.
- If employers build authentic relationships, people will unhesitatingly make referrals. They will think of possible candidates in response to your query and provide helpful info.
- Keep in touch with your erstwhile colleagues if you do not want to lose people who have worked efficiently for you in the past. They may become available once again as employees – or they will refer you to trustworthy candidates.
- Painstakingly search for candidates among LinkedIn members using right keywords that may lead to some useful LinkedIn profiles. You should also create a complete, keyword-rich profile for your business on LinkedIn. Prospective employees that are looking for employers search LinkedIn using keywords.
- It will be worthwhile to use Inmail, the internal inbox at LinkedIn and seek assistance from your network of professionals to find a qualified candidate for you.
- Remember to reply to questions in the Answers section of LinkedIn. This manner of responding can raise your profile in the LinkedIn community. Try to join groups at LinkedIn. Participants in groups may know of potential employees with the type of profile you seek.
- It is possible to post job vacancies on LinkedIn and recruit right candidates. In fact, LinkedIn offers job listings, candidate search, trusted referrals and the power of networks to identify candidates.
- Further, prospective job seekers can search LinkedIn free of charge based on keywords related to their positions. Certain premium features are also available to job searchers – though on payment of a fee.
What does the future hold for Mobile Marketing SEO
Mobile SEO refers specifically to the techniques needed to make websites rank higher in the results pages for searches conducted from mobile devices. Indications are the proliferation of smartphones and tablets will continue unabated in the coming years and this will make the mobile marketing SEO increasingly relevant.
It is plain truth that most of the people are giving up their laptop /desktop for browsing purposes. Mobile SEO is assuming crucial importance as smartphones, tablets are usurping the place of desktop and laptops.
If you fail to take notice of this irreversible trend and focus your efforts on mobile marketing SEO techniques, you will end up a big loser as web marketing today has completely gone into mobile.
Mobile SEO is assuming crucial importance as smartphones and tablets are usurping the place of desktop and laptops. Mobile marketing is not a passing phase and indications are the trend will continue indefinitely and for years to come.
A recent study has revealed that the use of mobile SEO is essential to help retailers and other e-commerce businesses to attract prospective buyers as mobile access to shopping sites is increasing at a phenomenal pace.
Online marketing companies that execute the mobile SEO strategies correctly will be able to generate optimum returns and edge out competition.
Presently, more than half of all searches are done on the mobile devices. This number will continue to rise in the years ahead as the manufacturers of smartphones and tablets are already adopting aggressive marketing methods to boost their sales.
From digital coupons to mobile wallets – mobile marketing has indeed come a long way. This is ample proof that mobile SEO will become more and more relevant as time progresses.
The day is not far off when Mobile SEO will become inescapable for grabbing the attention of mobile shoppers. Owners of e-commerce sites are keenly observing their data, and must have already seen mobile devices showing up on their radar a lot more prominently than earlier. The talk of smartphones and the idea of a store app is gathering momentum.
The years ahead will be crucial as every e-commerce site will realize the importance of mobile marketing as nothing can take them closer to their target audience than mobile devices.
Mobile devices will play a more pervasive role in online commerce. To stay competitive and to survive and thrive, online businesses should ensure that they are having a mobile-friendly website and using mobile SEO strategies to their best advantage.
Can Yebhi Brave The Rising Tradus
Buying from online stores is becoming a trend in the Indian market. The internet population of India is slowly shedding off its doubts to venture into online buying. Ever since online services were launched, there were questions about the credibility of such stores. Big names that entered the business gained margin but not an impressive lead. Now, with the buying habits of Indians changing clubbed with the growing influence of online stores with impressive offers, online stores are getting more traffic. In the competition for being the target of traffic, we find many stores fighting tooth and nail. Let us see how tough the competition is between Yebhi and Tradus.
The When And What Of Yebhi And Tradus
Yebhi walked in style into online business with huge collections of footwear in the year 2009. An online store that aimed to capture the footwear market, later stretched to walk further. Its wide range of collections now include apparels, footwear, electronic items, kitchen appliances, home appliances, mobiles, tablets and so on.
Tradus, the online platform serving to connect merchants and customers, launched its service in the year 2010. The online store deals with a wide range of products that include apparels, footwear, computers, mobiles, tablets, electronic appliances, jewellery, sports equipments, toys, books and many more.
Product Range – Who Outnumbers?
People are more inclined to online purchases owing to the wide range of collections on offer. With no sales person around, you could take your time to view various ranges across each category. Online shopping relieves you from the guilt of taking so much of the sales person’s time. Here, you are under no moral compulsion to buy a product after browsing for long if you are not satisfied. Hence, people love to visit online stores that have too much to offer.
Yebhi does not disappoint such prospective customers as it excels in product range. This is not to undermine Tradus’ efforts. Yebhi excels in almost every category and in spite of impressive collections presented by Tradus, Yebhi leads in the race.
Quality – Who Offers Better?
As far as quality of products is concerned, Yebhi does better than Tradus. Though Tradus deals with branded products like Yebhi, the quality of products in Yebhi is superior. Tradus needs to do thorough checking of the products available with it to ensure quality meets the brands’ standards.
Rate – Who Is Economical?
The rates offered by Yebhi and Tradus are cheaper than the rates offered by local markets. Hence, you get a better bargain while you make purchases from these sites. Yebhi has an advantage over Tradus as it covers a wide range of prices and hence you could find products priced lesser than Tradus. While buying from these sites, you may use Yebhi coupons and Tradus coupons to get the best out of your purchases. These coupons can be easily found at websites like Couponlava.com.
Customer Service – Who Serves Better?
Yebhi seems all set to conquer the market with its launch of Try ‘n’ Buy. The concept underlines the fact that Yebhi wants its customers satisfied to return for future purchases and recommend. Yet another fact that shows Yebhi in positive light is its approach to customers’ complaints. If a business considers the deal to be over once it pockets the money paid by the customer, it could not be more wrong. In fact, business starts from there. A deal that closes should bring in more businesses and failing to do so indicates lack of quality in products and services. Yebhi has been successful in promoting its name in the minds of the buyers.
Tradus, on the other hand, fails to address customers’ complaints. There are many complaints about delivery of faulty products and delivery of products that do not resemble the ordered products and so on. There are complaints about irresponsible customer service as well. If you take the negative aspects of Tradus into account, you will find that it has not risen enough to compete with Yebhi, one of the best in customer service.
Using impressive Graphic Design to make Web Design attractive
Graphic design is both an art and a science. The art part of graphic design relates to the imagination and creative skills of the designer while the science part is the technological innovation. The purpose of graphic design is to impart aesthetics and enhance the presentation value of your website.
The success of graphic designing lies in the process of blending graphics and text to effectively communicate your message to the reader. Graphic designing is critical when you are creating logos, brochures, posters, newsletters, product packaging, business cards, websites, sales promotional material and all other forms of electronic visual communication.
We are living in the age of the internet and business houses are competing with one another to grab the attention of the viewers and graphic design is the key to make your online presence impactful. You must use a judicious mix of typography, page layout and visual images to create well-balanced, appealing and presentable end-results.
Website graphic design represents your business visually and the role of graphic design is to make your audience spend more time on your website in preference to a host of other competitor sites.
Regardless of the value of your content, a website may still not impress the viewer unless there is a strong sense appeal that graphics alone can provide. A browser surfing online content will invariably spend time on web pages that looks strikingly impressive at the very first glance – with the right blend of text and graphics.
Technology is incapable of providing creativity – it has to emanate only from the graphic designer’s mind. Of course, many graphic designers have developed his/her individualistic techniques and designing styles.
Graphic design comprises of back ground images, banners and button controls to color scheme, text style, and graphics. Using graphic design at the right place and in right measure will help your website stand out amidst a sea of websites.
The role of graphic design is to enhance the value of your web content. Inventive and engaging graphics are one of the ways that you can create a powerful impact for your website.
However, one has to be cautious about the extent of graphics. If the sizes of the images or the videos are huge, it will take time to upload and the impatient visitors would just move to a different website.
Your website can only impress the visitor if you get the graphic quotient right. Spending money on graphic designing cannot be construed as an expense, it is a long-term investment.