Sean Pollock » – Sean Pollock

Quickly Touch Up Photos with Photoshop

Sean Pollock — Sat, 21 May 2011 02:56:31 +0000

Make a Photo Better in 3 Steps!

Over the past couple years I have edited hundred’s of photos. Some photos require advanced editing but for the most part they just need a quick touch up. So I developed a little 3-step process to make any photo look better in a matter of seconds. This effect gives photo’s a warmer tone, sharper contrast, and a slight sepia feel. Take a look at the before and after photo demonstrating the effect.

Step 1

Open up your photo in Photoshop. Navigate to Imagine >> Adjustments >> Levels, or press Ctrl+L.
A screen like this will pop up.

You want to pull the black slider right so that it’s right before the black “moutains” start rising. Pull the white slider left until the mountains start sloping upwards again. Each photo is different so play around with the sliders until you get something that looks right. (Black slider inwards = Darker, more contrast, White slider inwards = More brightness and less contrast). See the below photo as a reference.

Step 2

Now your photo should be much better lighted and contrasted, with much of the grey tones removed.
Now Navigate to Layer >> New Adjustment Layer >> Gradient Map. Click okay. Now in the layer panel set the blending mode on the adjustment layer you just created to “Soft Light” and change the opacity to 27%.
This should make your photo just a slight bit darker.

Step 3

Final step! Once again navigate to Layer >> New Adjustment Layer >> Gradient Map, click okay. Somewhere in your Photoshop workspace you should see this window:
If you don’t see it, click Window >> Adjustments and it should pop up. Click on the black to white gradient and a drop down box of different gradients should appear. Select the one that changes from purple to orange.
Set the blending mode to “Soft Light” and lower the opacity as desired. I usually keep the opacity for this gradient map at around 70%.

The Final Product

That’s it! It takes only 30 seconds and it can dramatically improve photos. Play around with opacity’s on the Gradient Map layers and trying different leveling slider positions to fine tune the effect. Enjoy, and always remember, you learnt it from Sean Pollock!

(Click the photo to download High Res Photo, You may use this as a wallpaper, do not remove my name.)

Meta Tags and SEO: The Definitive Guide

Sean Pollock — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 03:35:16 +0000

What Are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are tags written within the section of an HTML document. They were originally developed to help the (at the time) dumb search engines learn what the page was about. In the past meta tags were extremely important; They were used mainly to link your page to common misspellings of your target keywords (For example, if someone searched Sean Polluck when looking for me). Nowadays search engines are a lot smarter, they automatically correct misspellings, and they can learn what a page is about from the content alone. On top of that, a common black-hat SEO practice was to stuff your meta tags with popular keywords that are irrelevant to your site in hopes of gaining some traffic. For these reasons Meta Tags are largely disregarded by Search Engines and typically not useful for SEO; however, when used correctly. a select few can help your site!

Note that most of these are useless and a waste of time to use!
Also note that these tags are written in XHTML! (self closing tags)

Jump to: Meta Tags you should use on your site, Meta Tags you can you on your site, and Meta tags you should not use one you site.

Meta Tags you should use on your site

The keywords tag is the most disputed meta tags of them all. Some people say they work great, some people say they don’t work at all. Here’s the reality. People for many years abused the meta keywords tag. They stuffed them with competitor names and totally unrelated, but often searched keywords. As a penalty for this most search engines greatly reduced, or totally removed keywords tags from their ranking algorythms. For example, Google does not use the keyword meta tags at all. On the flip side however many programs, especially those involving advertising, will use meta tags to generate appropriate ads and content. So while the tag is useful, it will not help your site SEO.

When using this tag, exercise caution. Make sure your chosen keywords are related, and present in the content of the page. Ie. if you page is about dog training, don’t include keywords about losing belly fat. You should use 5 to a maximum of 10 comma separated and specific keywords (don’t be broad!).

Should I use it? Yes

The description tag i the most important meta element. Click through rate, or CTR is a measurement of how many people see a link and decide to click it. A coherent and well written description makes your link more appealing to click. So if you use it on your page a much greater amount of people will be enticed to click through to you website on search engines. To use this tag , write a description using words and keywords present on your page.If you do this correctly, search engines will use the description in the meta tag in the search results. Keep the description less that 40 words, mine is 15.

Should I use it? Yes.

Meta Tags you may want to use on your site

This tag was developed for webmasters unable to upload a robots.txt file. Attributes can be replaced with one or more of the following: noindex, nofollow, noarchive, all, index, or follow.

Should I use it? Using the tag with the index, follow, or all attributes is unnecessary. A search engine will index your whole site unless you tell it not to. With that said, if you do not want the search engine spider to crawl your page, and you cannot upload a robots.txt, by all means use it!

This tag describes what the content type of the web page is, for example the page this post is on is coded in text and html so we would use the text/html type. The charset is up to you of course depending on whether or not you need special characters. I recommend UTF-8, it is an extremely versatile charset that should meet all your needs. This tag does not impact your SEO. If you do not include this tag, the users browser will use it’s default charset.

Should I use it? It is unnecessary unless you need a special character from a specific charset.

Most browsers will automatically cache (or save) parts of a website to the computer to save loading times. This meta tag instructs it not to. This tag does not impact your SEO. Caching greatly reduces web-server workloads and costs so it is highly recommended to allow caching on your website.

Should I use it? Only if you do not wish to have your site cached.

This tag states the language of the web page, English in this case. Very useful in the past, not so useful now. Most search engines are so sophisticated that not only can they detect the language of the page, they will translate it for you. The codes for different languages can be found at this website. This tag is useful if your site is in multiple languages, you can specify on each page what language it is on

Should I use it? If you are part of the special case mentioned above, then yes. Otherwise modern web browsers will automatically detect the language of your page.

Meta Tags you should not use!

This tag is intended for parental control software. Once again parental control software has gotten smarter since this tag has been implemented, and they can figure out which pages are safe or not without the tag. Other substitutes for “all” include: general, mature, adult…

Should I use it?: No this tag is seldom utilized and you may as well save a line of code.

This tag states the author of the web page. What software utilizes this tag? I don’t know to be honest. Many people like to have this tag on the page just so they can claim is as theirs.

Should I use it? This tag is another seldom used and largely unnecessary tag. You may as well save a line of code and not include it in your documents.

This tag states what software generated the page. The software can be anything from WYSWIG editors to wordpress. Mainly an advertisement for the software.

Should I use it? I suggest deleting it, if you want to keep your editors brand on your page then keep it.

This tag described the main theme of your site. Not used by many search engines and does not improve your SEO.

Should I use it? No.

Describes the type of page. Not used by any search engines.

Should I use it? No.

Type of program used to edit the file. Similar to the generator. Essentially it is an advertisement for your program.

Should I use it? I suggest deleting it, but if you want to support your editor go ahead and keep it.

Publisher of the web page.

Should I use it? Nope.

This tag is a hint as to when the spider should re-index your site. This tag was developed for a Vancouver search engine called search B.C., and is not supported by any major search engines.

Should I use it? No.

Primary Sources

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4

Secondary Sources

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Free Website Template – Simple Life V2

Sean Pollock — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 04:10:00 +0000

Simple Life was a free template released by Pat Heard at fullahead.org. I loved it but thought it needed a little extra something something. Simple Life 2.0 is a small but crucial design update.

Simple Life v2.0 is an extremely versatile, simplistic, beautiful and free, CSS Website Template. created by Sean Pollock for personal or commercial use. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada License. That pretty much means you can use it in any way you want, but you MUST have “attribution” to Sean Pollock, in the form of a link to www.sean-pollock.com. You may pay to legally remove this link (See download section).

Features

XHTML / CSS Valid
Custom table, form, list, highlight, biglink, column, acronym, and blockquote styles
Code is extremely simple and easy to use
Simplistic and elegant design

Mirrors

OpenDesigns.org
freecss.com

Live Preview See it before downloading Download SimpleLife.zip Remove Copyright Click here purchase non-attribution rights.

Free Website Template – Stylish

Sean Pollock — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 12:00:12 +0000

This week’s Free CSS Website Template is called sleek. Sleek is a very beautiful template, probably the best free template I have, and one of the best on the web. This site is perfect for blogs, portfolios, magazines and many other sites. Remember to leave a comment in the comments section and tell me what you think, and what you would like to see in the future! View the full post for download information

Stylish is an extremely versatile, simplistic, beautiful and free, CSS Website Template. created by Sean Pollock for personal or commercial use. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada License. That pretty much means you can use it in any way you want, but you MUST have “attribution” to Sean Pollock, in the form of a link to www.sean-pollock.com

Features

XHTML / CSS Valid
Custom table, form, list, code and blockquote styles
Code is extremely simple and easy to use
Simplistic and elegant design

Mirrors

OpenDesigns.org
freecss.com

Free Website Template – Sleek

Sean Pollock — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 12:30:04 +0000

Sleek is an extremely versatile, simplistic, beautiful and free, CSS Website Template. created by Sean Pollock for personal or commercial use. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada License. That pretty much means you can use it in any way you want, but you MUST have “attribution” to Sean Pollock, in the form of a link to www.sean-pollock.com

Features

XHTML / CSS Valid
Custom table, form, list and blockquote styles
Extremely simple and easy to use
Simplistic and elegant design

Mirrors

OpenDesigns.org
freecss.com

Free Website Template – Compact

Sean Pollock — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 03:52:05 +0000

This weeks free website template is called Compact. Compact is an extremely simple template. It is popular for loading extremely fast. The live preview is only 3.6 kb and loads in less than 0.2 seconds! Perfect if you want a fast and simple website. But just because it’s fast and simple doesn’t mean it’s boring and ugly. This beautiful template was designed by Sean Pollock with simplicity in mind. continue reading for a live preview, and a download link.

Compact is an extremely versatile, simplistic, beautiful and free, CSS Website Template. created by Sean Pollock for personal or commercial use. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada License. That pretty much means you can use it in any way you want, but you MUST have “attribution” to Sean Pollock, in the form of a link to www.sean-pollock.com

Features

XHTML / CSS Valid
Custom table, form, list, code and blockquote styles
Code is extremely simple and easy to use
Simplistic and elegant design

Mirrors

OpenDesigns.org
freecss.com

Free Website Template – Corporate

Sean Pollock — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:00:38 +0000

This week’s Free CSS Website Template is named Corporate. This extremely professional and sleek looking template is designed with businesses and professionals in mind. As usual it features lots of bonus code, including some notably beautiful tables. Continue reading for licensing information, a live preview, and the download link!

Corporate is an extremely versatile, simplistic, beautiful and free, CSS Website Template. created by Sean Pollock for personal or commercial use. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada License. That pretty much means you can use it in any way you want, but you MUST have “attribution” to Sean Pollock, in the form of a link to www.sean-pollock.com

Features

XHTML / CSS Valid
Custom table, form, list, code and blockquote styles
Code is extremely simple and easy to use
Simplistic and elegant design

Mirrors

OpenDesigns.org
freecss.com