Beta Testing Adobe Photoshop CS5 - WOW

Adobe has unleashed the hounds and given permission for its Beta Testers to talk about their experiences using PhotoShop CS5. Take a look at the past ten posts or so and you’ll see the power of some of the new arrows we’ll have to put in our quivers. There are a couple caveats Adobe has put on our talking about it. No one is allowed to show the interface, and we can’t say what the tool or routine’s name is that we’ve used. Guess they’re saving something for the grand reveal. Today’s image, and the last post, use one of the most talked about new tools that’ll make the price of the upgrade pretty much a “no brainer” (for me at least). What I will tell you about today’s panorama is that it would have been much thinner without CS5. I’ve tried this new feature on several images (panoramas mostly) and I can report that you do need the right image for it to work “as advertised”. Today’s image is a great example of the “right” sort of image. The sky could have been much more complex, but the lower half works amazingly well. The shift in color and light, the randomness of the detail and the repetition of the pattern make the math doable for CS5. Not every image will produce such excellent results. I’ve had a couple that just cracked me up. It reminded me of being back at Intel, doing demonstrations of early speech recognition software. I’d read from a script something like “I sat and wrote a letter” only to have it come up on the screen as “Is that Ann won’t let her”. You can, sort of, fit one into the other, but the computer translation really isn’t what was said. The photographic results are equally amusing. Like I said, it has to be the right image. It you’re interested in some general information about today’s image, hit the “read more”.

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What's Important In An Image?

What’s the important “story telling” portion of this image? Obviously, the most imposing piece is the lighthouse, but that’s not the story of the shot. The “story” is the couple sitting on the bench. It’s easy to create a story around them. You can see that they are looking at each other. Both turned toward each other, knees touching, familiar over the years. It appears that the woman has white hair and the man may have thinning or close cropped hair. It gives the impression of age. Is that why they stopped to sit on the bench? Have they been here before, at a younger age? Are they sharing something as strong and enduring as the sentinel behind them? Is the lighthouse a metaphor for their life together? Obviously there’s “something” bigger than the two of them in this image. What it is is best left to the person observing. The time of day depicted is another notable aspect of the image. It’s late in the day/life of the subject. The light, low on the horizon, has dipped low and illuminated the underside of the clouds, the couple and the symbol. The “story” can go on for the entire length of the page or be the opening image of something like “The Notebook” by Nicholas Sparks. The individuality of the story each of us see in the image is strictly a personal one. We each “see” what we want to see in this small, but powerful piece of today’s image. If you’re interested more in the how of the image rather than the illusion it contains, hit the “read more”.

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Making Masks Manageable

I think I’ve seen the gamut when it comes to people mis-understanding masks. I was at a “class” beiong taught by one of the areas self proclaimed Photoshop “experts”. The guy’s a professional photographer and he does make money using Photoshop. He just doesn’t know what he’s doing. The problem posed to the fellow was to make a woman’s face smoother, to give it a porcelain appearance. He said “no problem” and went about demonstrating how he would accomplish the task. The first thing he said was “I’d want to use a mask”. I thought that was a great start. He grabbed the Quick Mask Tool (Q) and painted in the cheeks, chin, length of the nose and forehead. He proudly announced “now we have a mask”. That took me aback, so I asked, “you do realize you’ve made a selection and don’t have a mask, right?”. His response was “no, no, you don’t understand. I used the Quick Mask Tool, so therefore I do have a mask”. That got me to wondering if this guy might have thought the Magic Wand Tool really had some magic to it. At another class, on a different day, in a different location, a woman was teaching masking techniques. I’m always up for adding a trick or two to my kit, so away I went to pick up a nugget or two. Her idea of making masks was big chunky blocks. Her apparent only use for masks was to produce knockouts to build montages. It’s a legitimate use for masks, but every time she didn’t quite get the mask where she wanted it she’d say “oops” and draw the mask again and again until she got it right. It appeared she didn’t know she could unlink the mask and move the mask or the layer independently from one another. Another “instructor” on the minus side of the slate. There are people running around giving classes on Photoshop (usually local “experts”) who must believe in the adage of “how fast do you have to run to escape a bear. One step faster than the guy next to you.” These people seem to know a little bit more than the folks sitting in front of them, so “the audience” thinks they’re learning valuable techniques. To learn more about the mask used on today’s image, hit the “read more”

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Just A Quick Seven Shots

We were out on Saturday with some friends, visiting the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. They had a special exhibit about the photographs behind Rockwell’s paintings/illustrations. The reason I said “paintings/illustrations” was because of the technique he used in his paintings. When you look at them, most appear to be a cross between a cartoon and a fine art painting. To say Rockwell painted in HDR wouldn’t be too much of a stretch. But, the piece of the exhibit we came to see was the photographs. Rockwell wasn’t a photographer at all. He’d hire professional photographers and either professional models or friends and neighbors to be his subjects. He went to great lengths to setup the shot/shots he’d use as studies for how an arm would fall or a leg would bend while walking. One of the paintings, “The Marriage License”, had the young bride to be dressed in a yellow dress. Being a stickler for accuracy, Rockwell gave the young lady in the “study photograph” money to purchase a yellow dress. The couple posed and the photographer shot while Rockwell directed “the action”. His bent for realism in the photographed could be seen in the shot. What couldn’t be seen was the yellow of the dress. The photos were all in Black & White. What’s the lesson here for us modern day shoots? When we’re forming the image in our head, before we ever snap the shutter, we should have an idea where the image is going. Some shooters go out with a tripod for every outdoor shoot. They have HDR (High Dynamic Range) images in their heads before they ever get to the place they plan on shooting. It’s their thing. It’s the type of shot they like to make. Some know what’s going on and some just use a tripod. Today’s image is a seven shot bracket taken specifically to make an HDR image. We were just wondering around Stockbridge downtown and came across the church in today’s image. It was reasonable early in the afternoon, about 3:00 PM. To find out more about how today’s image was shot, hit the “read more”.

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But Let's Look At It This Way

How many times do we look around when we’re out shooting? Many times we’re so “focused” on the subject we have that turning your head is the last thing you think about. If we were in a studio, shooting a model, how many times might we look at the leg of a lightstand and say “boy, what an interesting play of light and shadow”. Chances are, never. We’re too busy with the task at hand and, besides, the lightstand will always be there. The model won’t. Would it take that long to snap off a shot of the shadows? If the camera is being hand held, your shutter speed is going to be somewhere above 1/30 of a second. So that can’t be the limiting factor. Okay, if you’re being paid to shoot a job you probably don’t want to stop the shoot and go do something of a personal nature, but… You can always use the excuse of making some adjustment to shift off of the subject. I wouldn’t suggest shooting several frames, or squatting down, or getting up on a ladder, or rearranging the furniture, but a quick snap might catch something for your private files. More people shoot for personal use than will ever be paid for their work, so changing the instantaneous subject is not really a problem. Everyone should look around and be aware of your surroundings. Look left, right, up and down. To learn what today’s shot is all about, hit the “read more”.

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Deconstructing An Image

How an image is presented is a big deal when it comes to a recording of a scene or art. As has been talked about on the blog before, intent is the key to figuring out how an image should be displayed. In today’s image we see three different representations of what could be done to distinguish the shot. On the far left we have pretty much the straight shot. The only things that have been done are sharpening and applying a vignette. Would the image be anything special if left natural? No! It’s a shot of a flower with the seeds in focus and the back pedal going a little soft. Not a big deal. The center shows the image as a graphic, a line drawing type of treatment. This can be used to study an image, to pick it apart to determine what’s important and what can be diminished. There’s an application for this type of image. It could be used by a botanist to describe the markings on the pedals or study the shape of the seeds. If many flowers were treated in this manner, someone with the proper background might be able to discern problems in one batch over another. There could be a problem at the farm or nursery a specific number of specimens came from. It could help the grower track down what is going on at his/her facility that causes illnesses in the flowers. The center portion of the image could be used for analytical purposes. The right hand section of the image is another type of graphic representation of the original image. The might be used as a study by a muralist. Murals aren’t typically painted as continuous tone objects. Murals are meant to be viewed at a distance, especially those found outside, spanning multiple stories of a building. For the painter to even attempt continuous tones would make him/her crazy. Once an artist breaks down the image to a manageable number of colors, the job of creating the larger than life image becomes relatively easy. There are several ways to break down images for specific purposes. Being able to do the break down for clients is an art. Understanding the needs determines the amount of “art” that needs to be included in an image. To review the two techniques (center and right) used to produce today’s overall image, hit the “read more”.

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Story Telling

What are the requirements for telling a story? There are all sorts of stories that could be told about today’s image. There could be a boring litany of facts, letting people know the species of the animal that made each set of tracks. It could be a story of survival, with one animal hunting another. A tale of discovery, when a child comes across this scene, is agog trying to spot each animal, assigning attributes that may or may not be true. One of the purposes for an image like today’s is to spark the viewer’s imagination. It doesn’t really inform, or tell an entire story, but rather draws those seeing it to read into the image things from their past, present or future. At the top of the shot we see the water. It’s water. It’s not clear if it’s a lake, river or ocean (it happens to be the ocean off the coast of Maine). It doesn’t matter, it’s a place like one we’ve been to in our childhood. Earlier on the blog I had a shot of Pemiquid Light. I gave a copy of the print to a couple acquaintances as a thank you. One of the first things they did was Google lighthouses in Maine. They found almost the exact same shot, over and over again. Next time I ran into one of them, she asked if that was really a shot I had taken. I kind of laughed and explained that 90% of the visitors to the lighthouse walk down onto the rocks, finds that same puddle (it fills in at every high tide), and shoots the same shot. You would be able to do that with today’s image. It’s a one of a kind. The tracks will be whipped clean at the next change of tides. The light will be different tomorrow. This shot is here and it’s gone. That where the viewer’s imagination shines through. The shot isn’t an complicated as you might think. To find out how ir was shot, hit the “read more”.

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