[NBI] Blog advice: Picture manipulation tools, and copyright

In my intro post for the NBI, I mentioned briefly tools that I use for writing up blog posts. What I didn’t mention was anything about prepping graphics for your posts, which for gaming bloggers will mostly involve screenshots.

If you are writing a blog that is very screenshot heavy or you want to do something fancier with graphics, this is likely going to be just a starting point. But for my purposes, the usual sorts of alterations I would make to screenshots involve cropping the screenshot down, and maybe touching up the image a bit if it has come out fairly dark.

A graphics manipulation program will also make it easier for you to lay out several pictures on the page, which you can do by combining them into a single new image that you fiddle around with until you are happy. Using cut and paste on the separate pictures to paste them into a new larger image as layers will let you move them around easily while you are working.  This, I have found by trial and error, is about a zillion times easier than trying to get separate image files laid out neatly in your HTML or word processor.

Once the image is in the blog post, you can use HTML/ formatting tools in your editor to position it. You can also adjust the size of the image in your editor via HTML or formatting tools, although the quality of the image may suffer a bit.

When you save the processed image file, you probably want to avoid using large graphics file types as that will make your page take longer to load. .jpg should be fine. (If you need more information than this about optimising for the web, it’s worth searching around via google as it’s a well trodden path with lots of good advice around.)

What I use

This is what I use, an old copy of Paintshop Pro (PSP) which we had a licence for in the house. It runs on just about anything (Windows based), and happily copes with anything I might ever want to do to my screenshots. If you feel like spending money on blogging tools, this one will serve you happily. I imagine the latest version does all sorts of fancy extra stuff, but this is good enough for me.

I’m also fond of being able to paste images from the clipboard direct into PSP. The picture above shows PSP with the ‘enhance photo’ menu open which is what I’d normally use to tweak the colour and contrast balance. All of these graphics programs allow you to easily roll back any changes if you don’t like how they look, so you can experiment a bit.

Free graphics manipulation packages

There are some good alternative graphics packages available.  These are three of the options available. GIMP and Paint.net both have large communities where you can ask any questions and find out about addons or tweaks. Picasa has Google behind it.

GIMP

GIMP is an open source program, and the link I have given here is to GIMP for Windows. It’s probably better known as a Linux program, but the Windows one works fine too.

It’s a very powerful graphics processing package, can be a bit fiddly to use, and if you want to use it I suggest paying close attention to the manual.

Picasa

Picasa is Google’s picture editor which was developed mostly to let people manage their photo albums online, but also lets you tweak and crop pictures for later use in blogs. You can download the client and use it offline to prepare pictures for publication/ upload.  It even has an option to upload your finished picture to Blogger (also a Google product).

It’s a nice simple tool without too many of the bells and whistles, and if you’re a bit nervous about diving into something like GIMP, this is probably the one I’d recommend you try for starters.

Paint.net

This started off as a student project to provide a freeware version of Microsoft Paint (avoid downloading OpenPDF by mistake from the same page, unless you really wanted it), and now has a fairly extensive following online.

I’d place this as a sort of happy medium between GIMP and Picasa in terms of complexity.

And those are just the start

There are also online tools which let you load up your graphic and manipulate it online, specialist tools which provide specific automated manipulations if you want to make your screenshots look like a funky collage or write your own text onto a picture of Einstein (hey don’t ask me, I just find this stuff), etc.

But you’ll likely find that most people use an offline tool to prep their pictures.

Copyright note

I am not a lawyer, but if you don’t own the copyright for an image, you should check with the person who does before you post it on your blog. Games companies typically don’t mind if you use media from their site, especially if you are praising the game (that’s why they make it available from the site in the first place).

If you want to check out libraries of photos, the Creative Commons on Flickr has pictures made available under a variety of licenses if you want to use them. The most basic is the attribution license, under which owners allow you to use their pictures in return for a link and an attribution (which is basic good manners anyway). So that’s one place to start. Different blog writers probably have their own favourite picture repositories, and no I’ve no idea where Rivs gets his hot chick pictures

The long blogging road to Cataclysm, and other thoughts

I pre-ordered my copy of Cataclysm a few months ago, so the boxes should hopefully be arriving today. As a result, I wasn’t actually online at midnight with the digital download crowd.

It didn’t matter. The excitement was off the scale last night and it was fun to be part of it. For some reason on my server when there’s new content due out, loads of people like to go stand on top of the quest givers to obstruct other people. They started to pile on top of the flight master in Orgrimmar at least 2 hours before the expansion actually went live. You have to admire that sort of dedication.

One thing this launch does mark is the end of the long (very long) blogging road from the last big WoW patch, which is when Icecrown Citadel was released, until today. For most of that time, those of us who weren’t in the Cataclysm beta had very little new high level stuff to write about.

This was the point at which the beta players were able to churn out maps and guides and information for a thirsty audience. And they did, in vast numbers. People ran out and bought Cataclysm related domain names purely on the strength of that beta invite (I’m not linking because it’s tedious over-commercialised levelling guide stuff, but understand that there is an actual business advantage to be gained from having priority access to the content).

And everyone else was writing about what our cats did that week, or the WoW equivalent. Now for me, being shut out of the new content means the blog posts start to get a little random. I hope it’s been an interesting ride, it certainly challenges me to get my head together. And it means that when my copy does arrive, I’ll come to the new content fresh and hopefully it’ll be bug free.

In any case, I’d especially like to thank all the other bloggers who didn’t have beta access (particularly if you focus on WoW) for hanging in there through the dry patch. There’s no in game achievement for that kind of dedication but that’s partly the point.

Incidentally, when I logged in this morning, one of my guildies noted that he’d seen level 84s on the server already. I suspect they will be raiding by tonight. (For comparison, as I write this, the expansion doesn’t go live on the US servers for another hour.)

There is also a discussion thread on mmo-champion about the world first 85 (yes of course someone hit max level already).

So how big is Cataclysm exactly?

We know that previous WoW expansions have been amongst the biggest PC sellers of the years when they were released. And there’s no reason to think that Cataclysm will be any different.

But this year there is a difference, Blizzard offered a digital download option and it’s likely that a lot of players will have taken them up on it. So how will we get the overall sales numbers? That’s going to be an interesting news story to look out for this week, especially if Cataclysm doesn’t hit the top of the sales lists for retail sales (although I suspect it probably will as well.)

And lastly, what do you do when Deathwing comes?

(Picture from ‘The Day Deathwing Came’)