21 Amazing Sites With Breathtaking Free Stock Photos

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attribution, Cavus Media, Christopher Gimmer, creative commons, free, freebie, jeff riegel, photos, Snappa, Snappa Blog, Stock, StockSnap.io, Unsplash

by Christopher Gimmer, Snappa Blog

Photography has always been an integral part of design. Unfortunately, we’ve grown accustomed to seeing crappy stock images of people in suits shaking hands. Not only are a lot of these stock photos tacky, but they cost a lot of money!

Thankfully, there’s been a growing number of websites with beautiful stock photography popping up all over the web. Best of all, they’re free!

In this post, we’ve curated a list of awesome websites for free stock photos.

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Bonus: We’ve included 30,000+ of these free stock photos into our graphic design tool. Get started with Snappa for free.

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Quick Note About Licenses

Many of these photographs are free from copyright restrictions or licensed under creative commons public domain dedication. This means you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

However, some photos may require attribution. We’ve done our best to identify which license they fall under but we still advise you to do your own research and determine how these images can be used.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into our top picks for free stock photos.

StockSnap.io

StockSnap.io has a large selection of beautiful free stock photos and high resolution images. The site also has a very handy search feature making it easy to browse through the thousands of images available. In addition, the site tracks views and downloads so you can find the most popular photos available.

StockSnap adds hundreds of images on a daily basis and all photos are released under creative commons public domain – no attribution required.

20 More, Read Here!

Browse and Download Almost 400,000 Images from Freeimages.com

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amimals, categories, Cavus Media, flowers, free, freebie, freeimages.com, illustrations, imagery, images, jeff riegel, landscape, patterns, photos, pictures, subjects, textures

by freeimages.com

You need it, you’ll find it! Browse, Search and Download Almost 400,000 photos and illustrations from Freeimages.com

Free Photo Categories

• Animals & Wildlife (43248)
• Architecture (78320)
• Army & Weapons (1198)
• Arts & Design (51594)
• Automotives (532)
• Business & Finance (14898)
• Celebrities (55)
• Education (5120)
• Fashion & Beauty (11191)
• Flowers & Trees (56234)
• Games & Cartoon (51)
• Gourmet & Drink (26883)
• Health & Medical (1825)
• Holiday & Festivals (14037)
• Home Designs (7558)
• Industrial (27686)
• Landscapes & Nature (102270)
• Movie & Music (1890)
• Outdoor Activities (23005)
• People & Families (43725)
• Religion (8339)
• Science & Technology (8586)
• Signs & Symbols (6233)
• Sports & Fitness (11605)
• Textures & Patterns (29802)

Or, view from over 2.4 million Premium images off their website…

Premium Photo Categories

• Animals & Wildlife (214711)
• Architecture (268444)
• Army & Weapons (25164)
• Arts & Design (49840)
• Automotives (6112)
• Business & Finance (264397)
• Celebrities (8296)
• Education (54848)
• Fashion & Beauty (61063)
• Flowers & Trees (287361)
• Games & Cartoon (179)
• Gourmet & Drink (387555)
• Health & Medical (98902)
• Holiday & Festivals (104680)
• Home Designs (99976)
• Industrial (124275)
• Landscapes & Nature (498892)
• Movie & Music (58095)
• Outdoor Activities (406407)
• People & Families (678939)
• Religion (57705)
• Science & Technology (150518)
• Signs & Symbols (269429)
• Sports & Fitness (56145)
• Textures & Patterns (303735)

Free: LUCiD Exposure for Photos

Tags

Athentech Imaging, boost, Cavus Media, color, exposure, fix, free, jeff riegel, LUCiD, LUCiD Exposure, mac osx, night preset, photos, restore

By Athentech Imaging

**Save 100%. Introductory sale price of FREE (regularly $14.99). Limited-time offer. Be sure to check out our other four great LUCiD apps to enhance your pictures. With LUCiD apps for Photos, you can quickly and easily make your pictures look their best.
LUCiD Exposure lives up to its name and brings your images to life with rich colors. It’s the perfect way to rescue your memories when the camera didn’t quite get it right, Our patented science automatically solves the most common exposure problems by quickly fixing dark photos, adding light to your images, and removing unwanted noise.

FAST & EASY FIXES
With LUCiD Exposure, it takes just one click to get the perfect photo. Choose from eight great presets designed by professional photographers. You can use the Strength slider to dial in the perfect setting.

REVEAL THE PERFECT PHOTO
Our technology replicates the way the eye works, accurately capturing light and details to reveal the image you saw when you snapped the shot. Cameras can’t handle tough exposures, but LUCiD can.

PROFESSIONAL, PROVEN RESULTS BACKED BY PERFECTLY CLEAR® SCIENCE
With LUCiD Exposure, you tap into technology used by pro photographers and large photo labs worldwide. They depend on our science to automatically produce 11 billion amazing photos every year. We continue to innovate with our team of physicists, engineers, and photographers to make your photos look their best, effortlessly.

WORKS WITH PHOTOS FOR MAC
Not only can you use LUCiD as a fast standalone application, but it’s a great extension that works with Photos for Mac. Use the power of LUCiD Exposure directly in the Photos app for Mac.

8 PRESETS CREATED BY PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHERS
1. Intelligent Auto – Analyzes the image and achieves an overall balanced exposure.
2. Outdoor — Brings out details by restoring contrast to a scene shot outdoors.
3. Night — Gently lifts the exposure and restores depth, contrast and color to nighttime scenes shot with low lighting levels.
4. Relight— Adds a small amount of gentle light to a scene that is dark. Works especially well on portrait photos.
5. Fix Dark — Boosts the exposure and makes several other subtle changes.
6. Gentle Boost — Adds a small boost in exposure and a large dose of color for your image.
7. Haze Removal — Adds a touch of exposure and depth for images that appear hazy.
8. Details & Shadows — Improves details and adds clarity in the shadows.

AUTO-CORRECT PHOTOS FOR PROFESSIONAL-LOOKING RESULTS
Time-saving presets developed by pro photographers
Quickly refine the results using the Strength slider
Use as standalone software or Photos for Mac extension
Can be accessed directly within the editing mode of Photos for Mac

lu·cid
/’loosəd/
1. Easy to understand
2. Bright or luminous
3. Fun, easy-to-use image enhancement Mac App, powered by Perfectly Clear® science

Time to stop dreaming about better photos and harness the magic of LUCiD to make your photos look their best.

More Free Goodness by The Creative Market

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add-ons, Cavus Media, Creative Market, elements, Fonts, free, graphics, jeff riegel, keynote, photos, powerpoint, template

by Creative Market

Every Monday, The Creative Market offers up free items for one week before offering a new set of goodness the following Monday.  Items include free fonts, add-ons, photos and various templates related to Keynote and powerpoint, not to mention the individual elements.  Hard to label them all, so check them out for yourself (every week!).  Click here for your weekly goodness.

This Week’s Freebies… Download these 6 free goods before it’s too late!

Carrig Refined by Paulo Goode in Fonts

 

Wildflowers & cereals by Elisartemis in Graphics

 

Bluberry Typeface + Free updates by Squarepack in Fonts

 

PRESETS AND CHILL TOOLKIT – Adobe LR by PRESETS and CHILL in Add-Ons

 

Ethereal by sylvatica in Photos

 

Liberty Keynote Presentation by Entersge in Templates

 

Free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos

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Cavus Media, free, hi-rez, high resolution, jeff riegel, photographs, photos, pictures, Stock, Unsplash, website

by Unsplash

Free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos. Hundreds already on this page!

For 10 new photos every 10 days, subscribe.

Submit a photo

More…

The End of Final Cut Pro 7

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end, fcp, FCP7, FCPX, GLJ Media Group, GPU, ipad, iphone, ipod, jeffvlog, mac. apple, photos, quartz, riegel, terminate

October 8, 2012

by fcp.co

The visual programming tool Quartz Composer hasn’t received much love from the Apple team for a while. Should Apple finally kill it off, not only will it be the end for many popular QC based plugins for FCP, it could also be the end of Final Cut Pro 7 itself.

You might or might not have heard of Quartz Composer, but you’ve definitely seen it in action. From screen savers, to animations in Mac applications, to the internal plumbing of some FCP plugins, it has been the engine used for many cool graphic effects using the GPU.

Whilst it hasn’t received the dreaded ‘deprecated’ label yet, we have heard from a variety of sources that they think it won’t be in the next big furry OS X species. This has two large ramifications for Final Cut Pro 7 users.

First of all, there are many plugin writers who use Quartz Composer to build plugins not just for Final Cut Pro 7 but other apps such as FCPX and After Effects. In the latter years of legacy FCP, QC helped speed up plugins by transferring the image processing away from the CPU and onto the GPU. Some products from Noise Industries, CHV-Electronics and others will all cease to work or perform very badly if Quartz Composer insn’t a part of the next big cat.

Secondly and most importantly, there is some Quartz Composer internally in Final Cut Pro 7 which means if it dies, so will legacy FCP. This is the first big indication we have seen that FCP7 might not run on a new version of OS X.

Yes you read that right.

So why are Apple not developing Quartz Composer further and what can we do about it?

Quartz Composer started life as PixelShox Studio until it was absorbed into Apple with its creator Pierre-Oliver Latour. It was a perfect match for Apple as it was a very quick and easy way to design graphic animations that could be embedded into Cocoa or Carbon applications. Enter the iPhone and Apple’s OS convergence policy and because Quartz Compositions won’t run on an iPhone or iPad, you can see why it’s been overlooked.

Apple need to know that we would like Quartz Composer out of the intensive care unit and back for more years of happy healthy life. If you have an Apple Developer ID then please contact them and register your interest. This is super important if any products you sell utilise QC. One developer also mentions the need of support for OpenGL Core Profile including a migration path for existing Quartz Composer plug-ins to OpenGL Core Profile.

If you are not a developer, then please use Tweets, Facebook, carrier pigeons or whatever to get the message out there that QC musn’t die. The more activity Apple see on the subject, the more likely they will be to respond. A comment below would be good too.

Don’t let this be the reason why Final Cut Pro 7 finally gets put to bed.

 

Transform Your Old Flatbed Scanner into a Cheap Lightbox

Tags

cheap, diy, do-it-yourself, flatbed, free, GLJ Media Group, jeffvlog, lightbox, negatives, photos, review, riegel, scanner, slides

June 17, 2012

Thanks everyone for participating in this past week’s DIY Do-It-Yourself photo & video projects.  If you have anymore suggestions on DIY projects or any other series, please let me know.  And, as always, take a half second to star-rate these posts when you get to the bottom!

by Michael Zhang

If you have an old or broken flatbed scanner lying around and gathering dust, a neat thing you can do is convert it into a cheap, do-it-yourself lightbox for viewing negatives and slides. Photo-enthusiast James Wilson did this as a weekend project:

It was a simple process; gut the scanner, hook up a light fixture inside it, and paint the inside of the glass white. Total cost was around ten bucks for the light fixture, wiring, and paint. [#]

You can read Wilson’s writeup here. There are also some additional photos over on Flickr.

This was one of my weekend projects (via Lifehacker)

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Download Free Stock Photos!

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download, free, GLJ Media Group, images, jeffvlog, photos, riegel, StockPhotosForFree.com

June 3, 2012

by StockPhotosForFree.com

Are you searching for the perfect image for your website, blog post, advertisement, or media project, but don’t want to spend a dime?

StockPhotosforFree.com has you covered,providing a selection of over 100,000 completely free stock photos that you can use in all types of projects (even commercial!), and there are never any fees.

 

Who are we, and why are we free?

StockPhotosforFree.com is owned and paid for by the stock video company, Video Blocks. Video Blocks has no interest in selling stock photos, since its core business revolves around selling footage, motion backgrounds and production music. So StockPhotosforFree.com was launched as a completely free resource, with the hopes of building awareness for VideoBlocks.com (which unfortunately is not free—but there is a 7 day free trial!).

Where do our free stock photos come from?

Most of the original 100,000 photos on our website were pulled as still frames out of the HD videos on VideoBlocks.com. But we are continually adding new photos to the website, including super high resolution shots from professional photographers. And even these will be completely free. So check back often!

How can you use our photos?

The photos you download from StockPhotosforFree.com come with a royalty-free license allowing you to use them in all types of projects (commercial or non-commercial), for worldwide distribution, forever. There are never any licensing fees. Literally the only thing you can’t do with our photos is redistribute them or sell them as stand alone stock photos. Read our license agreement for more information: StockPhotosforFree.com License Agreement.

 

From Love to Bingo in 873 Images

Tags

Getty Images, GLJ Media Group, images, jeffvlog, photographs, photos, pictures, riegel

June 2, 2012

by Getty Images

Pillaging the stock-photo database of Getty Images, director Cisma and AlmapBBDO art director Marcos Kotlhar made a coherent narrative film running at 15fps and using nothing but still imagery from the Getty library. (For fun, try calculating how much it would cost to make this film if you actually had to license each photograph.) The result is an amusing advertisement for Getty — but also, by bringing together so many substantially similar images, reflects on the same-old same-old quality that plagues a lot of stock photography!

 

 

Patient research work involving more than 5 thousand photographs resulted in a 1 minute film that AlmapBBDO created to advertise Getty Images, the world leading image database for creating and distributing visual contents. The film is surprising when showing 873 images in 15 images per second, sufficient speed to transform the series into a video that, without any text, tells a beautiful story. All photos, without any exceptions, are from the Getty Images archives.

Copywriter Sophie Schoenburg and art director Marcos Kotlhar worked 6 months researching images, improving the script and building each scene so they would not only be understood, but would also touch viewers. Sometimes, for example, a scene would look perfect on paper, but the images chosen to depict it were not sufficient or did not perfectly match up to offer the right movement and sense. And hence the research had to be restarted. The film was directed by Cisma, via Paranoid BR, along with Marcos Kotlhar, the art director at the agency.

For this creation team, the purpose was to adhere to the concept that Getty Images has so many images that anybody is capable of telling any story they want by only using their archives. In the film “Do amor ao Bingo em 873 imagens” [From love to Bingo in 873 images], a storyteller in the corner of the screen describes the images used. The Getty Images logo appears at the end of the story, but the storyteller continues to turn until reaching the exact number of images in the Getty Images archive.

 

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Top 8 Free Photo Mosaic Software…

Tags

collage, collection, images, montage, mosaic, photos

August 13, 2011

by Bright Hub, Written by: Arnold Zafra • Edited by: Rhonda Callow

A photo mosaic is a cool way of showcasing your digital photo collections. There are many photo mosaic programs available on the market today, both free and paid ones. Here, we list 8 of the best free photo mosaic software that you can use for your digital photo collections.

1. MOSAnICK

MOSAnICK is a lightweight utility for creating mosaic-based pictures which are based upon a source image but is made up from many miniature pictures. It keeps multiple image databases generated from your pictures. The software also allows image lighting and tinting model adjustments as well as image mirroring.

2. Andrea Mosaic

This software allows you to create beautiful photo mosaics from video/movie, black and white mosaics and from few tiles of photographs. Andrea Mosaic also lets you set several parameters that will dictate the final appearance of your photo mosaics. These include width (2000, 4,000, 8,000 pixels), number of tiles per row, minimum distance between duplicated tiles, algorithms to be used for your mosaic, and whether you want to put a black line surrounding every tile in your mosaic.

3. Imosaic

A free multiplatform photo mosaic software written for the .NET platform and was also ported for the Unix platforms. Imosaic creates databases of images which are used to compose artistic photo mosaics. The software also allows the creation of 3D photo mosaic screensavers.

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4. MacZaic

A powerful photo mosaic software for Mac users, MacZaic allows you to create mosaics using one photo, a folder of photos or from pre-generated database of images. It requires the Macintosh Runtime for Java (MRJ) utility.

5. Metapixels

Metapixels generates both classical and collage-style photo mosaics which matches color and form through matching algorithms. The software works fast and usually takes only 75 seconds to generate a classical photo mosaic in 2048×2432 sizes. The software is a command-line, scriptable program and even offers a cheat option that overlays the photo mosaic with the original image. For classical photo mosaics, this software generates images which contain a copy of each constituent image.

6. RichMosaic

This software allows you to scan many digital photos and movies to create a mosaic. RichMosaic features an easy to use point and click interface and allows you to produce various types of outputs, including a list of pictures or movie frames, geometric squares, color, black and white, and sepia outputs.

7. MozoDojo

A free photo-mosaic builder that allows you use images from iPhoto, iTunes, Aperture, and even files from custom folders on your Mac. It uses a model image and an image database and builds a mosaic looking like the model image. MozoDojo renders the mosaic at high resolution and is ready for printing as a poster.

8. Mosaic Creator

Mosaic Creator allows you to create a large regular mosaic patterned images from many small cells. The software allows creation of standard photo mosaics and renders good images using least image collections and enhances image collections with fine color. Other features of this photo mosaic software include multipage thumbnail creation, thumbnail wizard, nonrectangular galleries, master and detail pages with full navigation, color schemes, photo commenting, watermark, borders, footer and support for EXIF information.

Original Article is found here...