Master The Image

Nothing more to post today other than hope you have a Happy Halloween!

"Hi, my name is Brian."

"HI BRIAN"

"I stand before all of you, proud to say that I have been Photoshop CS free for almost a week now, and I'm not turning back. Gone are the lonely nights when I had to convert my RAW images to DNG before I could view them. Never again will I be slowed down by the evil that is File Browser. Most importantly, no more will I be forced to live under the thumb of not being able to multi-select layers. I've done it. I'm a CS-free man, and you can be too!"

If you weren't able to get what is going on from the title of this post, or from the above gibberish, last weekend I got Photoshop CS4. All I can say is WOW!

Overall, I don't have too many complaints. It took me a bit to get it to run well without always telling me it was running out of memory for even the smallest tasks, but that is just Photoshop in general. I've also lost my palettes once or twice and had to quit the program to get them back (it wasn't because they were hidden with tab either). All and all though, I can't really say anything bad about it.

Now for the good stuff. First off, it's sad, but the thing I'm excited about the most is the fact that I can now multi-select layers. I know that has been something with us since CS2, but only having CS at home left me in the dark ages.

My next favorite thing is content aware scaling. Unlike many of photoshop's programmed filters and auto adjustments that only semi work, depending on the image, I would say 9 out of 10 times, Content Aware Scaling works BEAUTIFULLY!!!!! without any further enhancement at all. For that other one time, according to a video on NAPP's site, if you make a selection around what you don't want to effect as much, turn that selection into a new alpha channel, and then use that alpha channel hand in hand with content aware scaling, the desired result you want is a lot more likely. Check out the video here:
Content Aware Scaling with Dave Cross

Camera RAW 5 is awesome as well. If any of you have ever used Lightroom, you know there are a lot of pre-editing you can do now in RAW even before you open the image. Camera RAW 5 has brought us a lot of that same editing. Post crop vignetting; location specific adjustments from the adjustment brush; etc, etc.

I could continue to go on and on, but really, in order to get a real feel of it, you've either got to watch someone use it, or try it out yourself. I don't think you can download the demo yet, so in the mean time, head over to NAPP's CS4 Video Tutorial site and check out a lot of the new features for yourself. If you need me, I'll be happily multi selecting layers over here. :)

Well, it's been a couple of weeks since my last post. I missed last Friday from a little personal crisis I had come up. Nothing big too big, just big enough to divert my attention onto other things.


Photoshop CS4 as well as the other Creative Suite softwares, such as Indesign and Illustrator began shipping yesterday. Have you ordered your copy yet?


This last week, I had a friend of mine call me up and tell me another friend of mine was getting married, and that she wanted to me to take a picture of the Logan LDS Temple. I've shot a couple of different pictures of the temple in the past, but nothing I've been too proud of. It's sad, but I consider the Logan Temple one of the less photogenic of the Temples. I was howevever able to not only find a shot I liked, but had a chance to play around with HDR again. Check out the resulting below:



To get this shot, I extended the legs of my tripod, but kept them compressed like a monopod, and then cranked it up as high as the thing would go. I'm actually up against the fence, shooting through it. I could barely see through the viewfinder to see the shot, and was using my corded remote to fire the shutter.

4-5 weeks ago, I made some posts about image restoration. I had planned on having the image I was working on done for the following week, but things got crazy here at the studio and I wasn't able to finish it until Wednesday of this week. Check out the finished version below.

October is going to be one heck of a month. Not only do we have Canon releasing their new cameras, as mentioned in previous posts, but we also have Photoshop CS4 coming out as well. What more can you ask for in a month's period of time?

Here at the studio, we are really looking forward to CS4, especially since I'm still back at CS2. (Actually, I'm still running CS on the computer I have at home.)

Here link over at Adobe with more info about CS4:

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshop/features/?view=topnew&promoid=DRHXB

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned Canon's new 50D was coming out, a 15 mega-pixel camera sporting Canon's new processor, the Digic 4, and that something new might be coming out from Canon shortly. Well, low and behold, the Canon 5D Mark II.

Coming at us with a 21 mega-pixel full-size sensor, live view mode, HD video recording capability and more, the 5D Mark II gives a full size helping of Canon goodness. A full rundown of the specs, including price (US: $ 2,699) can be seen over at DPReview.com. Canon also has it listed on their site.

All I can say is October is going to be a good month. :)

HDRI - High Dynamic Range Imaging is the subject for todays post, and something I've been really interested in lately but haven't had much of a chance to play around with. In short, you take a couple of images of the same thing, each at different exposures to compensate for highlights, lowlights, and inbetween and then put them all together. This can be done by hand, or there are some programs that'll put it together for you automatically.

Popular Photography has a really good article on HDRI over at their site.

Here is my take at HDRI. You can see the 3 different images, taken with a different exposure for different parts of the image, and then all combined in the lower part.