This is scheduled to go live today (July 7) tomorrow (July 8).

“We’ve tried to make everything quicker and easier. Now when you hit the login button, you’ll get a login box pop up that won’t navigate you away from your current page. You’ll also be able to use either your member name or email address to login.”

Forums - Discussion - Front Page Blog: New login and sign up process | iStockphoto.com

To improve iStockphotos performance were getting a few hardware upgrades. The site will be down from Thursday, June 18 from 7 p.m. to midnight MST.

To reward your patience, get 10% off your next purchase of 120 credits or more next time you visit by using promo code HCKYE510. But, use it fast it’s only good for a week (offer expires Friday June 26, 2009).

iStockphoto will have a scheduled downtime on Thursday, May 28 from 9 p.m. to midnight MST. Thank you in advance for your patience while we give the site a little tune-up.

On Wednesday, 5/20, the forums will be offline for about an hour starting at 1 pm MST for maintenance.

Nothing exciting, no new features or functionality. Just some routine stuff that needs to be done. I’ll keep iStockScoop updated when we are back online. You can also follow on twitter:

http://twitter.com/istock

We’re thrilled to introduce you all to Mordy Golding of Design Responsibly and Real World Illustrator fame. Mordy will be around periodically with excerpts of his books on topics that iStockers are clamoring to learn more about.

How many times have you found the perfect piece of artwork but the colors werent exactly what you had in mind? In reality, whether youre a buyer or a content creator, you often want to make color changes in a file. Im not referring to global changes, like a Hue shift in Photoshop, rather, precise color changes to specific parts of an illustration. In general, vector-based artwork can be particularly difficult to edit in this fashion, as there are often many objects in each file, each with various colors, tints, and gradients, resulting in a tedious manual process.  

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All year long, designers pit their skills against each other in the iStock Steel Cage. If you don’t know the drill, it’s simple: a contender creates an original design. Their opponent takes the Photoshop® file and changes it, combining the existing elements with new images to create something new. Whoever creates the most impressive, original, eye-popping artwork wins.

Every year, we bring together our seasoned Cage veterans, along with some hungry newcomers, for a marathon tournament: the Battle Royale. It’s a gruelling schedule, full of late nights and countless hours tweaking layer masks and lighting effects. It isn’t for the faint of heart.

Last year, 117 iStockers entered the Steel Cage and endured an 85 Day ordeal. In the end, it came down to 2 designers, and nbodine walked away with the prize: Five grand.

This year it can be you. Enter Battle Royale IV on May 28th and you could win $5000 on Punctum Day.  

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In our first article on Lighting, we talked about properly exposing an image, bringing the right amount of light into our camera, giving either the film or digital sensor inside the correct information it needs in order to reproduce what we see. Now the next step is to get it all in focus.

Read the full article on istockphoto.com

After a long time in development and several months of internal testing, we’re happy to present our new default search sort: Best Match 2.0.

The algorithm takes many factors into account. One of these, keyword relevance, rates the importance of keywords in the files. Files can have up to 50 keywords, but normally only a few of those keywords describe the primary subject or concept. 

If you open your advanced search tab, you’ll see a new slider up in the top right corner, underneath the sort options. This lets you tweak your best match sort. 

Setting the best match sort slider to “high” causes the search engine to prioritize files with those primary subject keywords.

Setting the best match sort slider to “low” gives more prominence to the other factors (similar to the old Best Match).

The default position is right in the middle. It will stay wherever you set it from session to session, so after you’ve logged in and out, you’ll still have the same setting you last used.

But does it work?
Yes. Yes it does.

Okay, go into your advanced search tab, and pull your slider all the way to the left. This is going to give you a very best-match heavy ranking. Now search for cheese.

You’re going to see a lot of really good looking files, with quite a few flames up on the top. All these files have cheese in them, sure, but cheese isn’t necessarily the focus. You’ve got a lot of cheeseburgers, pizzas, and food icon sets.

Now, pull the slider into the middle and search for cheese again.
See the difference? There’s still some pizza and a few burgers, but suddenly there are a lot of isolated pieces of, well, cheese. You’ve got edam, swiss, and cheddar, all by themselves. 

If you pull it all the way to the right for a mainly keyword-relevance weighted sort, you’ll get even more images of just cheese. 

You can tweak the slider depending on your particular search. It’s like a sort within a sort, and it gives you a really great way of refining your results around a particular keyword. A “high” slider position is good for finding exactly what you want. A “low” slider position is good for brain-storming: you’ll get a variety of good files.

For our clients, we’re really excited to be giving you this customization option. At the end of the day, it’s all about giving you the best possible results when you search. And the best way to do that is to give you as much control as possible over what you see.

For our contributors, we hope that by increasing the number of best match combinations out there, it will mean more of your files are seen and downloaded.

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Accurate & relevant titles and descriptions improve a page’s Google Image Search ranking, which in turn helps our overall site traffic and increases sitewide sales.

Traffic is the heart of the Internet business. You have to get bodies in the shop if you’re going to sell the goods. In straightforward, simple terms, the more visitors our website receives, the more of your images we’ll sell.

Read the full article on istockphoto.com

Nearly once a week in the Illustration forum, somebody posts a message asking about Open Paths. Although the Illustration Training Manual contains a section on open paths (or shapes), the topic always comes up for clarification. This article will attempt to be the definitive word on the subject (see you in the forums). Well tell you why it matters, how to avoid open paths, and what the exceptions are. For designers and buyers, well let you know what it all means to you.

Read the full article on istockphoto.com

If you walk down between the windows at the southwest point of our wedge-shaped cafeteria, you can see two thirds of the horizon. The railroad tracks run past us on all sides, and depending on the time of day, the whole office can be hemmed in by trains. South of us cement mixers turn in and out of the concrete factory and trucks loaded with chicken coops come and go from the poultry plant.

Read more on istockphoto.com

If you use a lot of photo cutouts in your page design, youre familiar with Photoshop clipping paths. A clipping path is essentially an irregular vector shape drawn around the part of the photo that you want to clip, and see on the page. Since vector files are made up of, well, vectors, you can easily place them over other artwork and colored backgrounds without having to draw a clipping path. You can also wrap text around them with ease. Ill show you how with the two most common layout programs, Adobe® InDesign® and QuarkXPress®. Read more

That’s right, iStock now looks after your ears as well as your eyes. When filling your cart with the best photos, video and illustration the web has to offer, dont forget to stop by the iStockaudio aisle and mix and match some high quality audio wrapping to complete your project. Come and listen

Audio is a very important consideration when producing video files, whether they are produced with stock in mind, or for a blockbuster. Unfortunately audio is too often forgotten or given little priority when shooting video. No matter how dazzling the moving picture is, crappy audio will always devalue it. Read more 

Every year, for one week in April, the City of Cannes takes a step back from the moving image and celebrates the birth of film through the photographic medium: The Sony World Photography Awards is a week-long celebration of the photographic culture, history and image. 

It is with pleasure and delight that iStockphoto’s Content Team is joining forces with the SWPA in becoming the 2009 Official Amateur Category Selection Committee. In doing so, iStockphoto Inspectors will be the first ones involved with the entries & will make sure that the Members of the World Photographic Academy get the very best photographs to examine through the critical and final round of selection. 

Last year, two iStockphoto members (mlenny & swimnews) made the shortlist of finalists of this major event as artists & this year… we get to be a part of it as a recognized entity. Congrats to the iStockphoto Inspectors… and to this incredible community of artists for a job well done. 

The Movement is on* special thanks to our dear friend Aidan Sullivan The Sony World Photography Awards & iStockphoto

Lighting is probably the single most important aspect of photography, and is a huge topic. Every picture you take depends on good light. Mastering the basics of photographing a well-lit subject will help make your images useful for designers in everyday applications. When you know the basics, you can begin to explore the more dramatic possibilities of light: how the angle, power, and warmth of light effects your subject, stimulates emotions, and expresses your creativity.Read the full article on iStockPhoto 

You probably have a lot of questions when it comes to working with Vectors across color spaces. For this installment of Points & Paths, we try to answer as many as we can: the difference between RGB and CMYK, when to use each, and switching between.Articles - RGB CMYK Q & A | iStockphoto.com

iStock COO Kelly Thompson interviewed at MacWorld http://tinyurl.com/db4krd and http://tinyurl.com/al5jyw

Beefing up the smallest credit pack: http://tinyurl.com/cf635f