Image to Text, Tell a Story

Change a picture to text

Ski image to text

Suppose you were going to design a pamphlet for a ski resort.  Using the GIMP image to text system, you can display the text as a picture of the ski hill.

Image to text in 21 steps

  1. Open GIMP
  2. Open a new file with a white background.
  3. Click on text icon in toolbox.
  4. GIMP fontsLook at fonts in Tool Option panel.  Click on a thick one to select it.
  5. Key in word in black text
  6. Enlarge it but make sure some white space is around it.
  7. Crop it
  8. Right-click in the Layers panel and select New Layer
  9. Make sure you select Transparency and click OK
  10. S K I checkersRight-click again in the Layers panel and click Merge Down. (This allows you to erase.  Where the checkers appear beneath the picture, a transparent area has been created.)
  11. Fuzzy select toolClick the Fuzzy Select Tool.
  12. As you click on each letter and then press the Delete key, the black letter will disappear and become transparent.
  13. Download the background photo.  Make sure the width matches the width of the text.
  14. Click on the text image and press Cmd C to copy it into your clipboard.
  15. Press Cmd V in your background picture and move the text to the ideal position.
  16. Click on the background picture so that your text is anchored.
  17. Select a rectangle around the text.  Make sure you have enough white space.
  18. Click Image > Crop to Selection.
  19. Save your new image with a descriptive name.
  20. Export it as a PNG file into your Pictures folder.
  21. Go to your Pictures folder and double click on the name of your new image.

It is ready for you to use in your promotion.

 

If you had trouble following those 21 steps, watch the YouTube video again.

Image to text with Photoshop

Here’s how to change image to text to a photo with Photoshop.

 

 


Photo Editing Software, Photoshop vs. GIMP

Photo editing and effects

Checker board ball skyWhen it comes to photo editing software and those special effects you want, should you buy PhotoShop?  Or, should you get the free GIMP?

The answer is, “It depends upon your needs.”

GIMP covers most people’s needs

GIMP toolbox 2The Business to Community website says

Like Photoshop, GIMP supports the basic functions needed to manipulate images. GIMP supports levels, curves, layers, channel mixing, cloning, healing, transformation, editable text, etc. For many photographers and designers, this covers the vast majority of their needs. That said, there are many Photoshop features that haven’t (yet) made it over to GIMP.                Read more

 

Graphic designer, scientist,…

Blog Oklahoma says

GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows and more operating systems. It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes. Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done.     Read more.

Photo manipulation

A Technology Study Guide SlideShare presentation says

You can use GIMP for simple “paint” style projects or utilize its extremely powerful photo manipulation systemLearn more.

 

This photo editing software was developed by volunteers

A Wikipedia article says

GIMP is primarily developed by volunteers as a free software project.   Read much more

GIMP’s much cheaper

A Tech World article says

So, if you don’t want to shell out the big bucks for the likes of Photoshop you can’t beat GIMP’s price and there are a huge number of training guides on the GIMP site and elsewhere online.    Read the rest of the article.

Photographer switches to GIMP photo editing software

The LifeHacker website says

Over six months ago, I stopped using Adobe Photoshop and switched to the open source alternative, GIMP, for all my personal photography projects. This wasn’t the impossible task that most people believe it is.   Read more.

 

 

 

 


Peter Enns has been developing websites since 1996. He is a social media blogger and author of the free YouTube video-creation tutorial called 7 Day YouTube.

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Impactful Facebook Posts

Human cells

human cell impactfulThe human body has tens of trillions of body cells. I once told a microbiologist that I had heard that the inside of a body cell had a infrastructure as complicated as the infrastructure of London or New York.

He replied saying that it was at least that complicated. He did not accept the fairy tale of evolution. He was a professor. People tried to get him fired because he did not believe in the fairy tale. Watch this video about the inside of a body cell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzcTgrxMzZk.

 

Editing Photos with a “Free” Photo Editor

Photos improve customer engagement

Pictures through smartphonePeople are much more likely to notice your social posts, advertising, etc. if there is a picture attached.  So, it is important to learn a great deal about editing photos.

If you are looking for a “free” photo editor, the best photo editor to use is GIMP.

Short History of GIMP

GIMP began in 1995 has a school project between two university students.  Eventually it morphed into a huge project.   There were a large number of volunteer computer programmers who knew lots about editing photos.

Their goal was to create an open source program that did just about anything that Photoshop would do.  It would be available free online to anyone.

To learn more about GIMP, read the Wikipedia article.

 

My history with GIMP

I use GIMP practically every day.  I would not want to be without it.  As far as I know, it can do anything Photoshop does.

The word “free” is in quotation marks above because it was not quite free for me.  I tried to download it for free and advertising was attached.  It took a fair amount of time to remove the advertising.

If I had to do it all over again, I would opt for the $47 version called PhotoEditorX. You can download it with no advertising.

Besides that, there is so much to learn about GIMP.  I’m still learning.  The $47 version comes with 200 pages of illustrated manuals, 25 video training videos and easy-to-follow guides.

This is opposed to Photoshop that presently costs $120 per year.  PhotoEditorX has a one-time $47 cost.

Editing photos to create amazing pictures

editing photos to show money fallingThe Tech.co website has an article called 5 Tips for Creating Engagine Pictures that Increase Online Sales.  The article says: Some products make you happy, while others just make you sad. Your product pictures need to tell the story of what your product is going to do for your customer… . So set a goal, define the mood, or choose an emotionRead more.

GIMP video tutorial

editing photos to change backgroundLearn how to add images over an interesting background.  Read what the narrator of this video tutorial says:

In this tutorial I will be going over some basic concepts for photo editing (or manipulation) such as how to color correct an image, adjust the levels, adjust the hue and saturation, sharpen the image, tweak the brightness and contrast, and add a vignette. This tutorial is designed to help beginners with photo editing, but can also be watched by intermediate and expert Gimp users. I guarantee your photos will look more professional after watching this tutorial!  Watch video now.

 


Free Stock Images

    13 sources of free stock images

    • Better Google rankings if you use images
    • Each of the 12 links below go to a website full of free stock images.
    • Stocksnap.io
    • Pexels.com
    • Pixabay
    • On Dreamstime you can use search terms to find free images.  For instance, I entered “tall buildings” in the search box and saw 31
      search_tall_buildings-black-outlinefree pictures of tall buildings. If you are not on this web page and wish to go to Dreamstime, bit.ly/nocostimages will get you there.  Dreamstime has tens of millions of pictures & short videos from which to choose.
  • Go to the freeimages website (freeimages.com) and sign up for a free account and get free stock images.
  • download free photosAnother excellent source of free stock images is Picjumbo.  Every day more gorgeous free pictures show up.  They are available for free, even for commercial use, with no restrictions.    Important note: To get a free download into your Downloads folder, click on any image. Then click on the button to the left that says “FREE download”.
  • Gratisography is another site with royalty-free photos.  It does not have the excellent search feature that Picjumbo has.
  • Unsplash has free stock images — mostly landscape photos. They can be used for free commercially if you wish. There is even a search bar so that you can search for things such as “offices”.
  • Little Visuals is another source of free landscape photos.
  • After writing this post, I found another source of free images: DeathtotheStock.
  • And another one: Superfamous Studios.
  • Think about the category of high resolution images you want
  • Enter it in the search box
  • More free photos at public domain photos.
  •  Get free fitness, weight loss, and food photos

  • More free image websites

 

How to download free stock photos from FreeImages

  • Suppose you wanted a stock photo of a dog
  • Enter dogs in the freeimages.com search box
  • Many hundreds of pictures of dogs
  • 80% of the pictures free
  • 20% of them have a price
  • That’s how freeimages makes their money
  • Pictures with a price tag can be as cheap as $1.
  • More specific
  • Picture of a Dalmatian dog
    • Enter Dalmatian in the search box
    • Several dozen stock photos of Dalmatians.

 

 

 

  • After you see a thumbnail of a Dalmatian picture you want, click on it
  • Gives you a page with a larger picture and a download button.

 

 

 

 

  • Clicking on the download  button gives a large image
  • To save it in computer, right click and select Save image as.
  • This service dependent upon members sharing photos
  • So, if you become a member, upload some of your best photos
  • Let other members use them as royalty free images

Combine your free stock images

Pin it with Pinterest

After you download a number of images, the cheapest way to edit them is to use PhotoEditorX. It’s virtually the same as Photoshop which costs $120/year. PhotoEditorX costs $47 to download. The download comes with huge numbers of instructional videos. There are never any other costs.

To order it, simply scroll to the very bottom of that PhotoEditorX link and click on “click here to download now”.


High resolution and free stock images

  • One minor problem with high resolution images is the size
  • Just PART of it may occupy entire computer screen.
  • I solved that stock photography problem with Skitch
  • Look at the stock photo in Finder
  • Expand the finder as much as possible
  • Capture it with Skitch
  • Save with a descriptive name.

My photo is never too large now.


 

 

 

 

 


Peter Enns has been developing websites since 1996. He is a social media blogger and author of a free YouTube tutorial. It’s called 7 Day YouTube and will teach you how to make entertaining videos & animated GIFs.

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Best Images for Promoting — See Jaws Poster



Graphics are necessary

I never post on the social media without having a graphic.  You need that to get their attention.  It also tells part of your story.  Use the best images.

The JAWS poster

Jaws movie poster and Spiderman parody -- Best Images

If you want a good model for creating a graphic, look at the old JAWS movie poster.

You gotta be jealous of the guy who created that poster.  He did everything right.

I read an article called Movie Poster Creates JAWS-dropping Visual Storytelling Lessons.

The article said the graphics represented one of the best images in the industry because
♦ It is so iconic that people parody it.
♦ “JAWS” is in all caps making the reader slow down and think about it.
♦ The title is in red suggesting blood.
♦ The title is surrounded by white space to make it stand out.
♦ The swimmer is a naked lady.
♦ The shark is the same color as the water making the teeth stand out.
♦ There are bubbles beside the shark indicating speed.
♦ It told a story in about 2 seconds.
♦ It promised the potential viewers of the movie that they would see exciting action.

Go and read the article now.

 

Movie poster cliches with the best images

The Tech Insider website says

Eyeball and blue skyChristophe Courtois used his art skills and an extremely critical eye to create incredible collages of the 13 most overused movie poster cliches.  … Horror movies especially love an extreme close-up on someone’s eye. But they aren’t the only genre to use this tropeRead more.

Headless woman blog

The Self website says

Beautiful woman with long legs walking around New York City street wearing jeans shorts. Rear view.

Your favorite movies … are advertised through posters showcasing starring actors  … handful have opted into a problematic, yet pervasive, trend: They erase the faces of women. On poster after poster, Belsky saw a man’s face alongside a woman’s faceless, unidentifiable, and often sexualized body, and she decided it was time for this tired trope to stopRead more.

 

social media marketing

 

 

 

 

Inevitable Social Media
is a free 25 page ebook giving an excellent overview of social media
marketing.  To get your free copy, click on the picture of the ebook.

  Facebook logo

 



Online Marketing with LinkedIn 2

19 Tips for Getting the Most Out of LinkedIn

Return to the first 12 tips
online marketingRead the last 7 points.  As time goes by, read all 19 once in a while.  Eventually you will have all of these online marketing tips incorporated into your LinkedIn strategies.

13. Sprinkle pertinent keywords throughout your profile.  Don’t overdo it.

14. Join groups and get involved.  Don’t just wait for people to find you.
Join groups, engage in relevant conversations and connect with other
professionals.  However, make sure that the things you add to the
conversation are worthwhile.

15.  Update your status daily with high quality information.

16. Add visual content to your profile.  Showcase the videos, photos and
presentations that are related to what you do.  People like marketers,
real estate agents, interior designers and photographers all have rich
media to add.  What do you have?  To share your rich media on your
profile, select “edit profile” and follow the prompts in your “Summary,” “Experience” and “Education” sections.  It’s just good online marketing.

17.  Add recommendations.  Ask former employers and coworkers to tell the world how good you are at what you do.  Try to get 10 or 12 good recommendations in your profile.  It could help you to secure a job interview.

18.  Personalize your connection requests.    When you want to connect with someone for the first time, write something personalized.  They are more likely to want to connect with you.

19.  Follow your ideal employers.  Even if you love your present job, follow companies you may like to work for one day.  Post enough information so that representatives from those companies will get to know you.

 

More online marketing tips

LinkedIn Summary

The Linked InSights website gives 3 examples of amazing LinkedIn summaries.  Their website says: Your LinkedIn Summary is the most important white space on your entire LinkedIn Profile. What you choose to write here can make the difference between professional success or stagnation. I found 3 great examples which demonstrate the art of writing a powerful Summary.   More

LinkedIn Profile

The LinkedIn Talent Blog website has an article called How to create an effective LinkedIn profile.  It begins with: In my experience, the place where most people struggle in optimizing their LinkedIn profiles isn’t with their content, it’s with their approach.  Here’s the source of the problem…  More

The LinkedIn Official Blog website has an article called Creating A Killer LinkedIn Profile: Tips From Link Humans.  It begins with: Your profile is the place to show off your greatest successes and future aspirations. It’s also one of the first chances you have to make a good first impression for anyone discovering you on or off of LinkedIn—whether it’s a future colleague searching for you on the
Internet, a potential client looking at your past work before a meeting, or a recruiter deciding whether to reach out to you for your next dream job…
  More

This video is called How to Set Up a Winning Linkedin Profile.  Here is a comment that one of the YouTube viewers made about it: Well explained! Thanks for sharing #AprilleFranks-Hunt I feel personally feel more ready to start filling out my profile.

Return to the first 12 tips

social media marketing

 

 

 

 

Inevitable Social Media
is a free 25 page ebook giving an excellent overview of social media
marketing.  To get your free copy, click on the picture of the ebook.

 

To find the higher quality blogs about online mareting with LinkedIn, download a free copy of CurationSoft.  Then enter online marketing with LinkedIn into the search box. If you will upgrade from your lite (free) version of CurationSoft, you can become an affiliate and sell the software from your website.You will get a commission every time someone upgrades form the lite
version to the paid version.
 

 


Peter Enns has been developing websites since 1996. He is a social media blogger and author of the free YouTube video-creation tutorial called 7 Day YouTube.

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Best Photo Editor at a Much Lower Price

Multiply your promotions’ effectiveness

Best photo editor PinterestUse 8 different social media to multiply the effectiveness of your message.  On this page, the message is “we sell the best photo editor on the market”.  Or “if you think Photoshop is good, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”  PhotoEditorX is the best because it does what PhotoShop does at a much lower price.

Expect your visitors to have short attention spans.  So, create your message.  Then edit it down to say what you need to say and no more.

(To give you an idea of what short attention spans people have, consider this: Statistics show that more people will watch a Facebook video ad if it lasts less than 21 seconds.  So, advertisers are purposely creating video messages that say all they need to say in less than 21 seconds.)


Earn a percentage of the selling price for every book sold.

Click here to learn more.

This blog post will illustrate how to get more or less the same message across using

♦ Facebook pages
Google Plus
Twitter
YouTube
SlideShare
Pinterest
LinkedIn
Your own blog

Quick comments on each social media

Click on each of the above links to see an example of how each one tries to convey that fact that PhotoEditorX is the best photo editor.  Here are quick comments about each.  (If you are not presently using all of these social media, don’t rush into them.  Learn one thoroughly and then learn the next one.)

Facebook pages

See the blog post about how to set up a Facebook page.

Google Plus

You can have one Google Plus page for each aspect of your business.

YouTube

Video is extremely important to a good marketing campaign.  Consider these statistic from Diode Digital:

♦  Video promotion is 600% more effective than print and direct
mail combined
♦  Before reading any text, 60% of
site visitors will watch a video if available.

These statistics imply that you or someone in your organization should learn how to make YouTube videos.  See the YouTube video creation tutorial.  Watch the YouTube video that promotes PhotoEditorX.

SlideShare

See this SlideShare blog post.

interest

♦  The half-life of a Pinterest pin is 1600 times longer than a Facebook post.

♦  Pinterest was the fastest growing social network in 2014.
♦  A picture you can post can gain MORE visibility over time and be sending traffic to your website MONTHS after it was published.

Those statistics imply that it is very important to be on Pinterest.  Read this Pinterest blog post.

LinkedIn

Go to your LinkedIn home page and click on “publish a post”.  At the upper left you will see “your posts”.  Click on it to find all of the posts you need.

Read more about LinkedIn.

YouTube video

Watch the video below to get an overview of PhotoEditorX in one minute.

 

Promote PhotoEditorX with SlideShare

Best photo editor promotions

For me and probably for you, PhotoEditorX is the best photo editor.  To sell this or any other ClickBank product, it is a good idea to make use of all eight social media discussed here.  It would also be a good idea to use ScreenFlow to create a video in MP4 format.  It should be less than 21 seconds long, should promote your ClickBank product and should be published as a Facebook ad.

 

 


Peter Enns has been developing websites since 1996. He is a social media blogger and author of the free YouTube video-creation tutorial called 7 Day YouTube.

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GIMP Photo Editor

Free photo editor?

GIMP is a program that a group of programming volunteers created to more or less do what PhotoShop does.

I’ve been using GIMP regularly for the past couple of years and I really like it and use it a lot.

PhotoEditorXFor instance, I need GIMP to make proper Twitter posts.  A good Tweet usually has a picture accompanying it.  That way a person gets way more views.  However, parts of an image are often cut off unless the picture has the proper aspect ratio of 2 wide to one high.

When I send out a Tweet, I usually use GIMP to change the dimensions of the image.  (See Don’t Crop Twitter Image.)

Edit pictures like a pro

 

When you edit pictures, you can:

Change hair color
♦ Add highlights to hair
♦ Change eye color
♦ Remove pimples
♦ Remove freckles
♦ And much much more.

Related page

Editing photos with a “Free” photo editor

 

 


Peter Enns has been developing websites since 1996. He is a social media blogger and author of the free YouTube video-creation tutorial called 7 Day YouTube.

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E Cards, How to Make Greeting Cards

 

Create animated e cards in 22 steps

To create these 3D video e cards, you start with GIMP.  Make a solid green rectangle for the background.

Make a large black 42.  Create a new transparent layer.  Leave the visible background alone; it helps you to visualize what you are doing.

    1. Resize the rose (Image > Scale image).  Copy it into clipboard and paste it onto the top of the number 4.  Keep resizing until it is the ideal size.
    2. Keep keying in Cmd C and dragging the roses until the entire number is covered in roses.
    3. Delete the solid background layer, save and export your rose number as a PNG file.
    4. Open up Keynote.
    5. Drag the green rectangle onto the first frame of the e cards.  Have a large white space as shown in the video.  The “42” will be zooming out from the green space partially into the white space.  This will give it a 3 dimensional effect.
    6. Save your green background into your clipboard and paste it into 2 more slides.  When you paste an object into a new screen, the location (x and y axes) will be identical to the original location.
    7. Go back to the first slide and drag the “42” from Finder into the slide.  Use the picture below as a placement guide.
    8. A shortcoming of Keynote is that you can zoom out to no more than 200%.  However, you can zoom in much more than that.  So, click on your inspector’s action tab and scale down to 10%.  (Later you will play this backwards in ScreenFlow.)
    9. Copy the “42” and paste it onto slide #2.  Change the action to “none”.
    10. Copy the “42” and paste it onto slide #3.  Click on the text icon at the top of the page.   Change the text style to “handwriting”.  Key “Happy” into the text box.
    11. Copy and paste another copy  of the text box.  Change the word to “Anniversary”.
    12. Build in the word “happy” with the convergence effect for half a second.  Build in the word “anniversary” with the convergence effect for three quarters of a second.
    13. Click slide #1 in the left-hand column.  Open up ScreenFlow and start recording.  Click your Keynote play button and play the entire set of slides several times until you are pleased with the timing.
    14. Change the size of the screen to 1280 x 720.  Change the size of the video to fit the screen.  (If you do not understand these ScreenFlow instructions, click the YouTube tabs to find a tutorial.)
    15. This is the part where you will reverse your zooming effect so that the tiny “42” becomes large and off the screen. Find the part where the “42” zooms in.  Practice dragging your
      scrubber backwards so that the tiny “42” zooms out.  After you have this
      exercise running smoothly, record your actions with ScreenFlow and save
      it.
    16. Change the size of your video screen to 1280 x 720 and resize the video so it fits onto the screen like what you see in the picture above.
    17. Isolate the “42” zooming out video clip.  Copy it into your clipboard.  Paste it into your other video.  Continue editing it until it looks like the inner part of the video above.
    18. Save it to YouTube.
    19. Wait an hour or so until YouTube finishes all of the formatting.  Right click on the YouTube video and click on Copy Embed Code.
    20. Paste your code into the HTML code of your web page.  The video loop blog post will tell you how to modify your code so that it keeps repeating.


Earn a percentage of the selling price for every book sold.

Click here to learn more.

E cards — cool or corny?

A Gifts and Dec blog post asks
The question this column begs, however, is the relevancy of snail mail today. Since everyone is now on their computers and smartphones, is the meme equivalent to a handmade card? How does this bode for retailers?  Read more.

 

 


Peter Enns has been developing websites since 1996. He is a social media blogger and author of the free YouTube video-creation tutorial called 7 Day YouTube.

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