5 Ways Designers Can Get the Most From Social Media

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5 Ways Designers Can Get the Most From Social Media

When I talk to artists, designers, and photographers about social media, most confess that they feel there just isn’t enough time in the day to spend on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, and Pinterest. In many cases, social media can be a full-time job. With so many different networks to master, it is easy to become overwhelmed. That is why it is important to get the most from social media sites in the few hours or minutes per week that you do have to spend on them.

I am a long-time social media user and run the social media for Psdtuts+, as well as my own personal accounts. Over the years, I’ve learned quite a bit about what it takes to be successful on social media sites and in this article, I would like to share a few tips to help you get the most from these social networks.

Before we begin, it’s important to note that social media can help you in primarily two ways; to meet new people, and to consume or to disseminate information. In order to be successful at both, there are a handful of simple tasks that you can perform to help make your time and effort on social media sites much more worthwhile.

If you would like to get the most out of your social media experience, it is very important to follow enough of the right people. There is a tendency for many social media users to become complacent over time and to stop following new people. If you limit the number of people you follow to a select group, you are insulating yourself from information. To get the most from social media, you need to constantly reach out to and connect to new users in order to receive a diverse amount of information.

Finding new people to follow can be challenging however. There are several things that you can do to find new followers but there is one technique that I have found that works the best for me; I call it the Breadcrumb Technique.

The Breadcrumb Technique involves using some users as gateways to others. To use this technique, simply find a person or website that you enjoy and follow other users that they follow or communicate with. In real life this would be equivalent to befriending people that your friends are friends with. I like this technique because the people that I find are more likely to share common interests with me as well as other people that I follow. Those interests could include a love for Photoshop, graphic design, photography, or even something as simple as knowing the same people.

While the Breadcrumb Technique is great, it only works if you are constantly on the look out for new people to follow. If you stop paying attention or become complacent, it will stop being a useful way to find new followers. Remember, finding new people to follow is a long-term process and is not something you’ll be able to do over the course of a couple of days or weeks. In fact, it’s something you should spend years doing.

To get the most from social media, you need to constantly reach out to and connect to new users.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then sharing something on social media is the nicest thing that you can do. As mentioned earlier, social media has two main functions, to meet people, and to help consume or spread information. Sharing something on a social network is one thing that you can do to accomplish both tasks at the same time. By sharing someone’s post you’re not only telling that person how much you like what they have to say, but you’re also sharing that information with the people that you know. This means that you’ll not only get the attention and appreciation of the original content creator, but you’ll also become even more valuable to the people that follow you.

While liking and sharing other people’s content on social media is a great way to interact with them, likes and shares are only good for one-way communication. If you truly want to meet and make friends with someone on a social network, the best way to do this is to actually talk to them. Leave them a comment or simply reply to their tweet. Tell them what you think of their post, or even ask them a question. While most users love to count their own content’s likes and shares, what they are really looking for is an engaging conversation.

If your goal on social media is to meet new people, it is important to actively like and favorite everything you actually like. One of the biggest mistakes that people make on social media is that they don’t spend enough time liking and favoriting things. To get the most out of social media, it’s not enough to read someone’s updates; you also need to acknowledge that you’ve read it, by either liking or favoriting their post.

Why is this important? It’s important because most social networks send users notifications every time someone likes or favorites their posts. These notifications are a great way to help you connect, and eventually, users will begin to recognize and hopefully interact with you.

Liking and favoriting things are also great ways to leave a comment without actually having to leave a comment. While comments are certainly the most effective way to interact with someone on social media networks, sometimes, you will find that a comment either isn’t an appropriate response or that you don’t actually have anything meaningful to say. In that case, a like or favorite is the perfect response. Another thing to note is that there is such a thing as being excessive. Try to like and favorite things appropriately. You don’t want to come across as too aggressive.

Some social media users will tell you that it is important to have a presence on every social media network. For some users that might be true, but for most of us, you need to use your time more wisely. A large brand with a social media team can easily manage several social media accounts. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have a team of community managers to rely on, most us have to manage these accounts on our own.

To get the most of your social media experience, focus your attention to just a handful of social networks. Figure out which networks are best for you and focus your energy there. If you create lots of digital artwork, then you might find it best to focus on Twitter, Facebook, and possibly other sites like Behance. If you create lots of video content, then you might want to use Youtube, as well.

When I joined my first social network back in 2005, I had no idea what I was in for. Social media changed my life in more ways than I could have imagined. It helped me to land a great job, it taught me what it takes to build and promote a successful website, but most importantly, it helped to me to meet a lot of amazing people.

To be successful on these social networks, it is important to do more than just consume information. You have to reach out to and interact with people. For artists, designers, and photographers, that means seeking out people that share your interests, sharing interesting things with them, and actively communicating with people in your network. While many of these tips might sound like common sense to the average social media power user, it’s important for users to not get complacent and just use social media as a way to consume information. By surrounding yourself with like-minded people and immersing yourself into the conversation, you are much more likely to get the most from your social media experience.

Top 10 Reasons to Use Lightroom

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Many Photoshop users are not aware of the many advantages of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. In fact, many will tell you that they aren’t really sure what it is used for and how it differs from Bridge. In this tutorial, we will explain a bit more about what Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is used for and will highlight 10 reasons that you should start using this fantastic app today. Let’s take a look!


Prior to Lightroom, photographers and photo editors had long complained that they needed a better way to view, organize, and edit their photos. If you have ever tried to sort through hundreds or thousands of photographs without using an application like Lightroom, you probably know what a tedious process it is. So having fast access to your RAW photos is probably the biggest advantage that Lightroom will offer you.


Lightroom has a smart way of linking the photographs to a catalog file, which only records the changes you make to them, but keeps the photos intact wherever they are stored. This saves a lot of processing power and storage space on your computer. You might end up having thousands or tens of thousands of high-resolution RAW photos in your catalog, but Lightroom will still be able to open it up in a couple of seconds and show all the photos together.


Since Lightroom 4 you also have an interesting option called Embed Fast Load Data under the Preferences > File Handling tab. Enabling this allows Lightroom to load Digital Negative (DNG) files even faster. The only downside of it is that it makes their file size a bit bigger. DNG is Adobe’s own camera RAW file format, which is great for archiving.


Lightroom can convert all kinds of Camera RAW files into DNGs easily. Lightroom is part of Creative Cloud so if you are paying for the membership you are free to download the latest version to see out how it works.

The files containing all the changes and previews of photos imported into a Lightroom catalog

Keywords can save you a lot of time when trying to find specific photos, but it also takes time to properly add them to all your photographs. This is another area where Lightroom really shines. Bridge is good for keywording too, but Lightroom has so much more to offer. You can apply keywords while importing photos, you can add them to groups of selected images, you can apply them quickly with the Painter tool and you can even assign keyboard shortcuts to a set of keywords.

Adding keywords

This feature was introduced in Lightroom 4 and it opened up a completely new way of organising photographs by their geographic location. If you have a GPS device in your camera then you won’t have to do anything as your photos will automatically be placed on the map in the Map module.


This module uses Google Maps but you have to be online to make it work. If you don’t have GPS data saved in your photos you will have to place the photos on the map manually, but Lightroom really helps you out with its intuitive features and user interface. You can easily locate specific places on Google Maps’ search engine and then you can place photos onto the map by simply dragging and dropping them.


You can even set up Saved Locations for places that you visit often, which will again save you time when tagging your photos. The great thing about manual tagging is that Lightroom will automatically write a lot of useful information into the metadata of your photos, like the Country, City and Sublocation. These all come handy when you are filtering your catalog.

Using the Map module to geo-tag photos

A great feature in Lightroom is the On-image editing tool, which looks like a small circle with an arrow above it and another one below it. You can find this tool under the Tone Curve and the HSL / Color / B&W panels. By selecting it you can apply local adjustments by targeting specific parts of your photos. It makes the adjustments much more intuitive and more effective.

Using the on-image tool to desaturate colors selectively

Another big advantage of Lightroom’s catalog system is that you never have to save any of your changes as they are automatically saved into the catalog’s database and they don’t affect the individual photographs. This would already be amazing, but on top of this Lightroom also saves the history of every step of your editing process for each and every photo in your catalog. Saving the history is not even an option in Photoshop, so it is really nice to have this feature work automatically in Lightroom. You can even preview all of the steps of the History with the Navigator panel while moving your mouse over the steps.

Using the Navigator and the History panels to check the stages of the editing

Being able to compare your changes with the original photo is crucial in image editing and this is another area where Lightroom really shines. In the Develop module you have 4 different view options that you can use to see the difference between your original, adjusted, and edited photo:

Before/After Left/RightBefore/After Left/Right SplitBefore/After Top/BottomBefore/After Top/Bottom Split

What is especially useful is the Split modes as they allow you to see the changes on one single photo and you can easily drag the dividing line around to compare specific parts. To do this you just simply need to click on the photo to zoom into it. When you are ready with comparing click on the image again to zoom out.

Before/After Left/Right view

We already discussed how Lightroom allows you to quickly add keywords and GPS data to help you categorize your photos more efficiently but Lightroom also allows you to quickly filter and search through your photos very easily using the filter feature in the Library Module.


You can enable the filter menu by going to the View Menu or by pressing Backslash (\). Once enabled, you will see 4 columns which you can use to refine your search by adding criteria. You should start from left and keep adding filtering options to the columns on the right until you have refined your search enough to see the photos you were looking for.


It is also good to know that you can save your filtering results as a Collection so you can find them much easier the next time you need them. You can also turn a single keyword into a filter by simply clicking on the little arrows to the right of keywords in the Keyword List panel.

Searching for photos in the catalog with the Filter bar

Previously, we talked about the fact that Lightroom doesn’t change the photos, it only records the amends separately into a database. Based on this technology Lightroom offers a great way to save several different edits of the same photographs using Virtual Copies. The biggest advantage with this is that you can save a lot space on your computer, as you don’t need to duplicate files whenever you want to compare different edits.

Comparing a Master photo and its Virtual copy

Even though Lightroom is mainly for cataloging and editing photos it also offers video editing features. Don’t expect anything advanced like Adobe Premiere, but it still does a good job if you only need to trim and correct White Balance or the basic Exposure of your videos. Don’t try to use the Develop module as you will only be able to use Lightroom’s Library Module in the Quick Develop panel to edit your videos.

Trimming and editing a video in the Library module of Lightroom

Introduced in version 4, Lightroom now allows users to create photo books with the photos imported into their catalog, and even purchase prints of them using an online publishing service called Blurb. This built-in layout editing engine is great for anyone who wants to include an extra service like providing professional printed photo books for their clients. You don’t have to learn another application like InDesign, you can do everything directly in Lightroom. This feature is a big plus for wedding or event photographers.

Creating a photo book in Lightroom