Where to get royalty free large photos...

This morning before class Ami asked me how to locate photos that artists have given permission for others to use. The photolinks on the Mod1 page are typically not free--unless you search for "royalty free images" only--and then, often, the image is too small to work with in Photoshop. If you find a large image not royalty free (they want to charge you for it) it's considered industry ettiquette to let you use it for layout purposes, so that would be okay for this class (you're not reselling or reusing the image).

Images on Photobucket, Flickr or Deviant Art are often larger, but you don't know who has loaded the image and if he/she had permission to do so, so you run the risk of putting work into something you then can't own the rights to. On those websites, if the user identifies the image as their own and has not told you it was copyrighted, you are probably safe to use it in a composite.

I think the best option, however, is to use Google Image search. Go to ADVANCED SEARCH to choose images larger than 800x600 pixels that are "labeled for reuse." There's a lot out there that's free--it's just a matter of knowing how to search for it.

Another option if you can't download what you need BTW is to make an image as large as possible in your screen and click Command-Shift-3 to take a snapshot (entire screen) or Command-Shift-4 and drag-to-crop and release (mouse) to take a shot of only part of the screen. Since students often forget these keyboard commands, it's useful to know that every Mac comes with something called "Grab"--simple program probably in your dock that will walk you thru the process with menu commands. The grab icon looks like this: