Tag: Photoshop

Reading Around on July 8th through July 9th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected July 8th through July 9th:

  • The New York Times > Magazine > Second Gilded Age – “A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an expanded slide show on NYTimes.com entitled “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age” showed large housing construction projects across the United States that came to a halt, often half-finished, when the housing market collapsed. The introduction said that the photographer, a freelancer based in Bedford, England, “creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation.”A reader, however, discovered on close examination that one of the pictures was digitally altered, apparently for aesthetic reasons. Editors later confronted the photographer and determined that most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show. Had the editors known that the photographs had been digitally manipulated, they would not have published the picture essay, which has been removed from NYTimes.com.”
  • PDNPulse: New York Times Magazine Withdraws Altered Photo Essay – The New York Times Magazine has withdrawn a photo essay by Edgar Martins — described in print as having been produced “without digital manipulation” — because several of the photographs show signs of digital manipulation. The photo essay, which ran in the July 5 issue of the magazine, shows abandoned real estate projects.

  • Straight Dope Chicago: Followup: Is the late arrival of summer in Chicago proof of global warming? – “Here we begin to see a pattern. The long-term winter temperature trend is up, though not dramatically. Clearly the 1950s were an unusually warm time. Considered over a shorter period, however — from the bitterly cold winters of 1977-79 to the present — winter temperatures in Chicago have risen sharply. The past decade has been the warmest stretch in the past 60 years. That’s in line with the common observation among climate-change specialists that winters have warmed up more than summers.Now look again at the early fall chart. We see the same rising trend, although it started later. The average high temperature declined until 1993, but has risen markedly since then. Is this evidence of the seasonal shift some experts claim to have detected — an unmistakable sign of global warming? Eh, 15 years is too short a time to judge. But could “


“70INX70IN Versatol Tri-pod Screen Matte White Keystone Elim.” (Da-Lite Screen Company, Inc.)

Reading Around on May 11th through May 12th

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A few interesting links collected May 11th through May 12th:

  • Du laisser-faire à la loi : ce que font les autres pays pour lutter contre le piratage – Politique – Le Monde.fr – French newspaper Le Monde republished a photo of mine. Wonder what the article is about?
    FlickR/swanksalot
    Les eurodéputés ont pris le contre-pied du projet de loi français en confirmant, mercredi 6 mai, leur opposition à toute coupure de l'accès internet décidée par une autorité administrative.
  • Jesse Ventura: You Give Me a Water Board, Dick Cheney and One Hour, and I'll Have Him Confess to the Sharon Tate Murders | Video Cafe – I'm bothered over Guantanamo because it seems we have created our own Hanoi Hilton. We can live with that? I have a problem. I will criticize President Obama on this level; it's a good thing I'm not president because I would prosecute every person that was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it. I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law. (KING: You were a Navy SEAL.)
    That's right. I was water boarded, so I know — at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence — every one of us was water boarded. It is torture.

    It's drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you — I'll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

  • Burning and Dodging with Adjustment Layers – "Burning & Dodging With Adjustment Layers And Masks"

    a useful little tutorial

Reading Around on January 25th through January 26th

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A few interesting links collected January 25th through January 26th:

  • How to Replace a Sky in Photoshop – “Got an image that is great, except for that lifeless dull sky? Learn how to replace the sky in an image using Photoshop in this tutorial.”
  • Op-Ed Columnist – Will Obama Save Liberalism? – NYTimes.com – “This is William Kristol’s last column.” Awesome news.

  • Blog-Sothoth: netflixed What Times Is It There – Sounds awesome. Added to my Netflix queue.”What Time is it There? is a quiet masterpiece–and literally quiet, because there is about ten minutes of dialogue in a two-hour film. If you need traditional plot in your flicks, avoid this one like the plague. It moves like an ethereal dream.”
  • Media Matters – Goldberg publishes badly doctored version of Rose/Brokaw interview as purported evidence of Brokaw’s bias – Bernie Goldberg is just a hack, talentless, bitter hack. “In another house-of-cards example of purported media infatuation with President Obama offered by Bernard Goldberg in his new book, Goldberg echoes Rush Limbaugh by printing badly doctored “snippets” of an interview between Charlie Rose and Tom Brokaw. Goldberg’s doctored transcript of the interview falsely suggests, among other things, that Brokaw expressed the view that “there’s a lot about [Obama] we don’t know,” when, in fact, Brokaw attributed that assertion to “conservative commentators” and that comments Brokaw and Rose made about their lack of familiarity with the candidates applied only to Obama when, in fact, they were referring to Sen. John McCain as well.”

Adobe Photoshop CS4 One-on-One

Seth Anderson0 comment

Picked up a copy of Deke McClelland’s new book for Adobe Photoshop CS4. Came with 4 hours worth of lynda.com instructional video, and plenty of tips and techniques. I usually find at least a dozen good new things in these sort of books, and relearn a bunch of things I used to know. Too bad there isn’t an upgrade price for computer manuals too.
From the Amazon site – top ten new features, even though some aren’t really that new:

10) Spring-loaded tools. Temporarily select a tool by pressing and holding its shortcut key. For example, when retouching an image with the healing brush: Press and hold Y to temporarily get the history brush, erase part of your modification, and then release Y to return to the healing brush.

9) The Adjustments palette. Nondestructive adjustment layers (which are independent layers of editable color adjustment) are now handled in a palette. Some folks will love the convenience, others will lament the many changes that were required to accommodate this feature. Mostly, though, the palette aggregates stuff that’s been there for ages. One new item, Vibrance, enhances color intensity without exaggerating noise.

8) The Masks palette. CS4’s other new palette is largely another aggregator, providing convenient access to old features. Three new items: The wonderful Color Range command can now directly generate masks. Color Range can see base colors based on proximity. And you can blur edges parametrically (meaning non-permanently, by the numbers).

7) The enhanced Bridge 3.0. The Bridge is CS4’s asset manager, permitting you to preview and organize your images. Auto-updating workspaces, a review mode complete with image carousel, full-screen preview, folder-independent image collections, and search-based smart collections are just a few improvements. Oh, and you can assemble multipage PDF contact sheets from the Output panel.

6) Improved toning tools. Paint with the dodge tool to lighten an image; paint with the burn tool to darken. Only thing, the tools used to suck. Now they’re so good, I actually use them on a regular basis. They’re still destructive (meaning they permanently change pixels), but in a good way!

5) Camera Raw 5. Essentially a logically organized and altogether independent color adjustment application, Camera Raw continues to be that top-secret tool that makes every version of Photoshop worth buying. This time, it offers the equivalent of nondestructive and highly customizable dodge and burn. Which you can apply as brushstrokes or gradients. Plus you can add vignettes inside crop boundaries. It’s like a free copy of Lightroom bundled inside every version of Photoshop. Which given that Lightroom costs more than a Photoshop upgrade, and this is just feature 5 of 10, is fairly significant.

4) Target adjustment tool. Associated with three color adjustments—Hue/Saturation, Black & White, and Curves—the target adjustment tool lets you selectively modify colors and luminance levels by dragging in an image. For example, drag on a model’s lips to boost their saturation. No need to isolate a hue range. Just drag. Honestly, if you aren’t loving this tool within a week, check to make sure you have a pulse.

3) The tabbed-window interface. This feature has already proved controversial, with a few noisy Macintosh users in particular voicing disapproval. But speaking as a cross-platform guy with a decidedly Mac bias, it’s a net-sum gain. You now have the option of docking every image in a tabbed window. Click a tab to switch documents. Drag a tab to reassign priority. Plus, you can drag-and-drop a layer onto a tab to move that layer from one image to another. The tabbed window interface is a masterpiece of design and a thing of beauty.

2) Content-aware scaling. Part of Adobe’s advance compositing suite, the Content Aware Scale command lets you stretch or squish low-contrast “background” elements independently of high-contrast “foreground” ones. Which means you can bring people together, turn horizontal images into vertical ones, and otherwise transform photographs intelligently. My guess: five years from now we’ll all be mocking this feature for what it got wrong. (The degree to which it can mess up certain images is fantastic!) But in the moment, you’re going to be singing its praises. This is Photoshop’s first truly magical feature since the magic wand. And that was 18 years ago, babies. (Okay, the healing brush was also magical. And that was, what, seven years ago? So we’re talking three magical features in two decades. Got to admit, magic is rare.)

1) OpenGL navigation. Forget all that other stuff. Seriously, content-aware scaling? As if. So far as I’m concerned, Photoshop CS4 offers one and only one new feature: OpenGL navigation. Assuming you have a video card that supports OpenGL (most do), then here’s what you get: Slow continuous zooms. Rotate the view. Get the hand tool, toss the image, and watch it sail across the screen. Hold down H and click and hold for bird’s eye. And by God if every zoom level isn’t a thing of bicubically rendered beauty. (No idea what I’m talking about? Trust me, huge.) OpenGL navigation is so good it makes me hate CS3. Some nights, OpenGL navigation and I open a bottle of wine and just talk about how lucky we are just to have met each other. It’s that good.

Courteous Shade Sold

Seth Anderson4 Comments

Courteous Shade
Courteous Shade

I don’t think I mentioned that I sold a print of the above photograph to Faulkner + Locke, Inc. They are working on a project in Elk Grove, Illinois1 and requested a 30″ x 40″ of Courteous Shade to be hung in a conference room. I asked a professional photographer I know for advice on pricing, and print shop recommendation. He highly praised Printmakers Chicago, and I was quite pleased with how friendly and efficient they were. I certainly would use their services again in the future.

I had a brief moment of panic when the image file I initially sent had too low of a DPI to be printed out that large (my Photoshop file was probably 12″ x 7″), but per the instructions in Scott Kelby’s Photoshop for Digital Photographers I changed the pixel dimension (9600 wide, and somewhere around 6428 tall), the resolution to 360 pixels/inch, and used the Bicubic Sharper sampling algorithm. This did the trick, and the print came out looking sharp, and if I say so myself, beautiful. I shipped the print out last night.

So if you are ever in a building in Elk Grove, and see the above photograph, please let me know, I’d like to see how they framed the photograph.

Footnotes:
  1. a hotel, presumedly, though I don’t know the details. Also, Faulkner + Locke was quite pleasant to work with as well [↩]