Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch

I bought 300 photo credits from BigStockPhoto today so that I could start gathering images for the Minx 1.2 theme library.  (I've already added 20 new standard themes, but now that I've found this resource, I plan to add many more.)

Then I realised that while the colour and composition were fine - I could tell that from the samples - I hadn't checked any of the images at a larger size for detail and artifacts.  Something you'd generally want to do before forking over $300.*

Fortunately, the level of detail is very good, and compression artifacts are barely noticeable even when you zoom in and hunt for them.  (In most cases, I can't see any artifacts at all.)  Since the images are going to be cropped and reduced anyway, the quality of the files is more than sufficient.

So look for some interesting new theme choices soon.

* If you spend $300, the photo credits are $1 each; if you spend less, they're between $1.40 and $2.50, so it make sense to buy in bulk if you intend to use a lot of photos.  Low-resolution photos (about 1 Mpixel) run 1 credit each, medium resolution (about 2 Mpixel) run to 2 credits.  I'm using the medium-res versions so that I get more flexibility in cropping and scaling - and because the end product can be up to 1000 pixels wide - so I get 150 photos for my money.  Which is great, because looking at other stock photo sources that allow use in web templates, the prices I saw ranged from $25 to $100 - and upwards - per photo.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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