Category: Adobe

Sharpening in LAB Mode

JasonLeave a comment

That’s right, the podcast is done…this is part deaux of what will likely be a three part series that speaks to my work flow in LAB mode. The first tutorial dealt with curves and luminance adjustments in the LAB color space, and here, I illustrate how to sharpen in the LAB color space. Great stuff here, and I also briefly touch on producing an action that will create various layered sharpness levels so you can pick and choose which suits your needs best.

Also helpful are some formulas I’ve learned on what works best for various scenarios. I intended to include these in the podcast, but I am trying to cut down on podcast length and keep extraneous info to a minimum. Nevertheless, the various sharpness levels are relevant, so I am including them here:

For people, portraits, etc.: An amount of anywhere from 120-150%, a Radius of 1.o, and a Threshold of 10 works well.

For cities, architecture, etc: An amount ranging from 50-65%, a Radius of 3 and a thresh hold of 2 does great.

For general everyday use: For all others, I try an Amount in the range of 80-85%, a Radius of 1, and a Threshold of 4.

As always, these numbers are not set in stone, and will vary depending on the types of photos you are working with and your particular tastes. Nothing is ever set in stone in a subjective field like photography, so take this information with a grain of salt, and pepper to your own tastes.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s the Sharpening in LAB tutorial! Enjoy! (And feel free to leave a comment or idea – if you do, you’ll be the first!)

Camera Raw Tutorial is up!

JasonLeave a comment

I gave up again trying to figure out how to embed the flash file into the blog page, and keep the layout somewhat decent looking, so I am going to continue linking to a dedicated video podcast page, where I will likely end up building an html front end to reference down the road. It’s an admittedly rudimentary look at ACR (Adobe Camera Raw), and while there are some really great extensive resources out there (I highly recommend Jon Canfield’s book on the subject), this should be a nice intro for those that have shot jpg and are thinking about making the move to raw.

In any case, here it is…enjoy! Thanks for stopping in and don’t forget to vote in the Content poll! 🙂

Fair warning though – it’s a long video, and the audio is kinda on the loud side…

Camera Raw Video Tutorial

Terrible Tuesday Stwess!!

JasonLeave a comment

Well, terrible Tuesday’s post is about the length of my latest video podcast severely biting me in the you-know-what.   As it turns out, Flash has this limitation of 160,000 frames, so to circumvent that, there seems to be only two options:  record in shorter segments and splice them together in Flash with Action scripts (I don’t have Flash…using another software solution right now, still in trial form…), or encode as a FLV file (the shorter flash videos have been encoded with the more common SWF format.  SWF gives higher resolution, loads faster, and is also more common…so I didn’t even know much about FLV prior to tonight and my history with swf/flv players in WordPress.  Well, since I don’t own flash, my only real option was to encode as an FLV file.  This is taking forever!  I am now looking into how to do Action scripts and purchasing Flash as it seems this might be a more viable long term solution for me…but, it does delay the Camera Raw tutorial another day.  It did give me some time to sit down re-tune the blog to allow for embedding flash video files locally, without needing to hang a video podcast out there hanging in the wind where it can’t get picked up by the all-important blogger feeds of the masses (iTunes included). So, I think I shall call it a night early, and make sure things are picture perfect tomorrow after work. For today, I guess the “masses” that tune in will just have to wait along with me in agony!

No news for Monday

JasonLeave a comment

Well, that may not be entirely true, as Tips from The Top Floor has a few updates both in audio and video format, so stop over there for some weekyl news and info about Chris’ trip to the great ole U.S. of A. He’s going from CO on to California, and then some other place before finishing up in St. Lucie FL, so if you get a chance between now and Oct. 18th to listen/view – you may wanna do so as now I am even thinking of making my way down there for a few days.

Please also say a prayer for Scott Sherman and Michael Stein from The Digital Photography Show. Before this week I did not know that their affiliation began because both their children are affected by Cerebral Palsy.   Scott’s had to have a surgical procedure this last week, and yet he still managed to find some time to produce the show. Suffice to saw, I would have been long gone and Canon Blogger would not have even been on my radar – so thanks to Scott and Michael and my prayers go out to both of you as you walk this noble path – esp. to Scott given the recency of its impact on his life personally.

Finally, Strobist had a couple cool posts recently, first one about Flickr where you can see your “ranking” on there – serious submitters only though as if it’s less than that, you probably won’t show up many times. Another cool post is about using small off-camera lights to help illuminate landscapes. A neat example is there too, so go check that out.

Finally, another podcast is ready for viewing! I did run out of time for production tonight though, so will have to wait until tomorrow to finish it, but promise a rather lengthy one (about 30 minutes) is forthcoming and discusses quite a few details about working in Camera Raw for your post processing. Stay tuned and it should be online in less than 24 hours! Until tomorrow then…Happy Shooting!

Closing out the week with a new tutorial!

JasonLeave a comment

That’s right, I’ve finally got enough of an act together to record a new tutorial. It’s another Photoshop tip, and this week is kind of a tangential feature of Photoshop, in that it’s not one you would typically use Photoshop to produce as Adobe has other products that perform this function better. There are also other applications on the market that do this equally well, and probably with equal if not better results, but if you don’t have them, PS is a neat alternative, especially for preserving things like drop-shadows and text style treatments like gradients and other stuff commonly associated with Photoshop. In any case, the tutorial is linked at the end of this post. You can download for iTunes from the link as well.

In other news, I also was able to successfully arise early enough to catch a sunrise shoot at Isle of Palms today. I had my trusty Canon XT with me, and I found myself enjoying swapping between the 18-55 kit lens, a Sigma macro lens, and my Canon 70-200 4.0 L The colors were okay, but nothing really spectacular to write home about thus far in my review of the shots. I’ll hopefully have a few to share tomorrow, but in the meantime, enjoy the video podcast. Until next time, Happy Shooting and enjoy the weekend!

Creating PDF files in Photoshop

Some Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts

JasonLeave a comment

During some downtime in photography shoots, I took some time to assemble a short tutorial on some of the keyboard shortcuts that you can use in lieu of clicking with your mouse or pen tool. It’s quite simple, with each button having a letter dedicated to it, and you can toggle between the tools on the button by using the Shift key in conjunction with the associated button letter. Check out the video here: Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts

(ETA: The audio quality of the video podcast was pretty bad for some reason, so I re-encoded it and the updated one should be up in an hour or so…thanks for the understanding.)

I also put together a cheat sheet of all the keyboard letters used and the function associated with each usage of the Shift+letter combination. That can be downloaded directly via PDF here: KB Shortcut Cheat Sheet

Any questions, comments, or feedback are appreciated – the “How do YOU learn?” poll is still going on, and I’d love to see some more responses there, so rock the vote and share your thoughts here.

Thanks for stopping in and have a great rest of the weekend. I’ll try to get a few shots from the lighting workshop up tomorrow. Until next time, Happy Shooting!

Software updates for Canon 40D vis a vis Adobe

JasonLeave a comment

Adobe has released raw converter updates for both Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom to incorporate more bodies and their algorithms, the 40D being one of the most noticeable (for me) among them.  For anyone using these software programs, the downloads are available at the Adobe website:

Photoshop:

Windows Download

Mac Download

Lightroom:

Windows Download

Mac Download 

Helpful note:  Owners of CS2 and earlier PS versions should not attempt to update with this raw converter – it’s meant for CS3 users only…