Category Archives: Adobe
A visit from Andie Smith!
Friend of the blog, Andie Smith has generously donated her time again here to share some insider tricks and tips to get the most out of Lightroom 3 – she shows her work flow, what the effect of various presets are in LR, and how to effectively use them. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…Andie Smith It is no secret I love Adobe Lightroom… the rumors are true, I refuse to edit without it. As I’ve created my own presets I realized if they are created correctly you can “stack them”. What is stacking? It is similar to using more … Continue reading
Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Scott Kelby!
You’ve surely learned by now that my Q&A with Dave Cross on Monday, and the subsequent discussion with Matt Kloskowski on Tuesday, had to mean that another one was coming, right? For those of you living under a rock for the past ten years, those two are but 2/3rds of the Photoshop Guys crew. The guy that started it all, Scott Kelby, has taken the time to sit down and chew the fat with us here, so to wrap up this series, I’d like to present, the Founder of NAPP, the CEO of Kelby Media, and Photoshop Guy – Mr. … Continue reading
Q&A With Matt Kloskowski
Picking up where we left off yesterday with Dave Cross, I’d like to welcome Matt Kloskowski to Canon Blogger and the LDP crowd. He’s taken time out of his schedule to answer a couple questions about his approach to photography, Photoshop and graphic design! Without further ado, I give you: 1. I’ve often heard that in LR post production the top-down and left-to-right approach is good, but also that setting camera profiles is a good first step, which is on the bottom right. What’s your approach? Once Adobe added the camera profiles, it messed up my whole top-down approach. So … Continue reading
Q&A With Dave Cross!!
That’s right, you read that right – I got a chance to get with none other than the Photoshop Guys and ask a few questions about Photoshop, their own projects, and tackle everything from product preferences to personal projects and activities, and even a few personal perspectives thrown in for fun! Here’s a chance to catch up on the latest with them including their podcasts and shows. So, let’s just get right down to the brass tacks here…with so much content, it’s broken into three separate posts for today through Wednesday. Getting things started is Mr. Dave Cross!!!
Friday Round-Up
A bunch of news for today – as most of you know, our inaugural workshop was this last weekend in Anaheim, and boy was it rockin’! Great participation, great input, and super feedback from everyone. On the anonymous feedback forms, every ranking was either a 9 or a ten (and there were more of the latter than the former)! Such a rush to see so much appreciation, and Denver is sure to draw an even bigger crowd. There’s only a few early bird seats left (3 I think), so if you haven’t registered yet – better sign up while the … Continue reading
Fly, Teach, Fly!
The adrenaline has worn off, and the inaugural workshop for Learning Lightroom 3 came to an end in Anaheim yesterday! It was a great workshop, and the feedback we got was just off the hook – 9′s and 10′s across the board. What was everyone’s favorite part? Naturally the prizes took the top notch, but a surprising second was our tips and tricks for how to get the most out of Lightroom 3. People really seemed to feed off the suggestions we made for everything from backup recommendations to advanced retouching techniques, and catalog maintenance and image management. It’s events … Continue reading
Lightroom 3 Contest Winner!
After much deliberation over the fantastic compilation of images for the July contest, I’ve finally had to just make probably one of the toughest judging decisions I’ve had to make thus far in the history of the contest series. However, in light of the theme of the contest (Slick), and the creativity that went into the image itself, I have to give the nod to Stephen Ludgate for his submission:
Shooting From the Hip
While recently taking a reality break and visiting family in my old stomping grounds, I had a chance to tour the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, NY. Viewing museums like these is a lot of fun for both kids and adults – kids because of the activities, and adults because I think as you get older, you can start to appreciate with more awareness just how tough things were (or how easy they are now).
Creating the color video
As promised from last weeks post on Youtube, I promised to share the “how to” on the creation of the little teaser video for transitioning from a black and white photo to color. For those that don’t remember, the video is here:
Free Copy of Photoshop Lightroom
The Workshop Tour Takes Off!
After extensive preparations, logistical planning and coordination, it is very exciting to finally announce the often teased and hinted at Learning Lightroom 3 Workshop Tour! Kerry Garrison and I have pooled our collective resources and we’ll both be at all the classes! We’ve got an initial launch in six cities, with dates and locales already in place at: Sunday Aug 1st – Anaheim, Ca [Register Now] Saturday Aug 14th – Phoenix, Az [Register Now] Saturday Aug 28th – Denver, Co [Register Now] Saturday Sep 11th – Minneapolis, Mn [Register Now] Saturday Sep 25th – Seattle, Wa [Register Now] Sunday Sep … Continue reading
Photoshop is not a bad word
A lot of photography conversations revolve around the question of how much editing has been done to a picture. Terms like “sooc” (for straight out of camera) or raw, or “minimal editing” are involved. I also have been known to encourage capturing the best pictures you can in camera. But does that mean editing in post process is a bad thing? No, definitely not. For some, it has become a bad thing though, and phrases where “photoshop” has become a verb have been bandied about a lot. I’ve heard everyone from amateurs to pros say things like “We’ll just photoshop … Continue reading
Lightroom 3 is here – Now What?
With all the hubbub of the release of Lightroom 3 and all the resources that cropped up online in mere minutes of the announcement, we often find ourselves asking more questions once the excitement and energy that surrounds a product release has drained. I took these questions with me to a conversation with Senior Product Manager Tom Hogarty last week, and got a lot of insights and answers, with both a technical perspective and that of long-term development. I give you this week’s podcast:
Cultures Colliding – a Podcast with Martin Bailey!
On this week’s show, we’ve got a lot to talk about including a couple of particular news stories to note, with a little insight from the crew, we’ll be taking your questions and answers on the show and the special guest of the week for this show is none other than the well-reknowned Martin Bailey! Photo News 1. 3rd Annual Worldwide Photo Walk has been announced by Scott Kelby, and details are here. 2. Lightroom 3 was announced last week Monday – and is available to purchase and download…you can also download a 30 day trial for free from Adobe … Continue reading
Lightroom 3 FAQ
With the release of Lightroom 3 the other day from the folks over at Adobe – I’ve had an influx of several repeating questions. While I’ve replied to (hopefully) everybody, it’s useful to note those questions and the responses here as well for my first ever: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Frequently Asked Questions 1. I tried the tethered capture, but Lightroom does not appear to let me adjust shutter speed, aperture or ISO with my (fill in your camera body type). Is this model not supported? Answer: The tethered capture is only intended as a capture function. The display shows … Continue reading
Five Tips to Better Photos
With the sudden surge and swell in the blogosphere, Twittersphere and Photosphere over Lightroom 3 hitting the streets (and a nice combo discount is available in the sidebar by the way), let’s not forget that this software is all meant to be doing one thing – letting us get back to the business of taking photos instead of spending our time in our computer. With that in mind, I’m bringing back a popular concept of “Top Tips”. Today, I give you…(drum roll please): “Five Tips to Better Photos” Be Ware of Exposure Values – No matter how good your camera … Continue reading
Lightroom 3 Q&A (Beta)
What a great day to release a new podcast – with the final release of LR coming out very soon, I had the distinct opportunity to talk with Rob Sylvan, author of LR2 for Dummies, and the forthcoming Taking Stock. We talked a lot about Lightroom, working at NAPP, and took a few listener questions and answers. More photo news, additional Q&A, and a new feed for the podcast start today, so be sure to download the latest show. You’ll notice I have pulled the feed back to this site, and the format is more iTunes compatible (m4a) so you … Continue reading
Can you trust your meta data?
We all talk about tags, and flags and meta data whenever we are importing our photos into Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, or whatever program you use. While there are discussions ad infinitum about the value of adding extra tags to your photos like “2010″ or “Canon” or “family vacation” or whatever labels you like, there is an underlying set of “fixed” data that contains HUGE amounts of information about your picture, and that is the EXIF data.
Five Best Kept Secrets of Photoshop CS5
By now you should know all about the latest and greatest features of Photoshop CS5. People have been talking until the cows come home about Content Aware Fill, Puppet Warp, and the other “sexy” features of CS5 (and they are pretty awesome, sure). Heck, you may even know about some of the JDI (just do it) features, but there is still so much under the hood of CS5 that the gurus and pros haven’t even discussed yet. After taking some time and tinkering around inside CS5, here are five features that I am surprised are not getting more “air time”…I … Continue reading
Making the Switch…
We’ve all heard the stories of people switching vendors. Scott Bourne was noted for his switch from Canon to Nikon. Friends and family often talking about switching from Ford to Chevy, or from Coke to Pepsi, and even *gasp* switching from PC to Mac. As I find myself moving more and more toward Apple products I contemplated making another switch – from Verizon to AT&T. You see, my contract with Verizon was due to expire soon, and I would then have the choice (and choice is a good thing) to move however I want. For me it was a tough … Continue reading
What Flash versus HTML5 is really about…
Surely you’ve heard the whole ruckus about Flash versus HTML5, Apple versus Adobe, and the Conan vs Leno thing now, right? Well, before we all get too caught up in these heated debates, let’s take a step back and think about what is really going on here… For photographers, the Flash versus HTML5 debate that has been raging between Adobe and Apple for several weeks now really doesn’t matter a lot. Have you noticed that? Photographers really don’t care. By and large photographers are mostly interested in seeing where things go because it will define how they push their content … Continue reading
Creating a Monthly Desktop Calendar
I alluded to it yesterday, and have already had several people inquire about the procedure to create this desktop calendar. It’s really quite clever, and kudos go out to Jeffrey Friedl over on his site for the script: http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/calendar He does a decent job at the basic explanation, but since we are a visual world, here are some step-by-step instructions on how to run things from beginning to end! Fair warning – this does require Photoshop as the script (I don’t believe anyway) will run in Lightroom because it uses layers… 1. Download the script from the link above (I … Continue reading
It’s Official – CS5 has been released!
Yup, the day it became available for purchase/download, the trials also became available – a first for Adobe! I’ve already downloaded it and am starting to play with it for the first time (was not a beta tester). Suffice to say, it’s pretty slick and yes, as I said yesterday, I am getting the upgrade! Rather than show you screen shots and pore over the list of new features which has been done ad infinitum, I did a short video of some of the settings I like to adjust on an initial install. So, here is that video straight from … Continue reading
