Apparently, Adobe will limit upgrades to CS6 to only the owners of CS5 or 5.5. If you have an earlier version and you want to upgrade to CS6 you may want to look into finding an upgrade to your current product. The following passage from their site clearly states the policy: “With regards to upgrades, we are changing our policy for perpetual license customers. In order to qualify for upgrade pricing when CS6 releases, customers will need to be on the latest version of our software (either CS5 or CS5.5 editions).” Read more about this and a short window of opportunity to upgrade your current Photoshop to the latest with some discounts.
The Soft-Focus Effect
August 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
I 
have written about the model photographs with electroluminescent skin with razor sharp eyes and eyelashes and made a presentation (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) on how to edit portraits for pleasing and plausible results. I have also challenged PSA to be more diligent on what they promote, implicitly or explicitly. Poor technique, when accepted by a large number of people can give the illusion of being right, or being a new “trend”. However, a close inspection of the photographs and what the master portrait editors, like David Cuerdon, do to edit their model photographs will make it abundantly clear that texture-free skin is a fallacy. Like its logical cousin, it may actually appear quite logical or acceptable in the absence of sound foundation logic, or sound photo editing workflow. One has to apply clear reasoning to avoid falling victim to fallacies, and use better tools to yield better photographs. To see some samples of this sort of portrait editing see the PSA exhibition acceptances, medal winners this year, last year, and quite likely next year. [Read more...]
Ligtroom Exposure vs Brightness, 2
August 5, 2011 By 2 Comments
The Case for Color Shift
The previous installment of this post, Lightroom Adjustments: Exposure vs Brightness was featured on the facebook Lightroom page and brought a very large number of visitors to this modest site. Over 5,000 visits and more than 8,000 page views were exceptional numbers for Kept Light. Also, comments and questions both on this site and on facebook nudged me to continue the investigation and focus on color shift during the exposure and brightness adjustments.
I made a color and gray scale ramp in Photoshop with carefully applied colors and grays. The purpose was to see if the saturation or the hue would change differently under different adjustments. The sample was imported into Lightroom and I took careful measurements of each patch in Lightroom. The top row of numbers in each cell represent Photoshop RGB values in which each color changes from 0 to 255. The second row of numbers are the Lightroom measurements where each channel has percentage values that range from 0 to 100. The first thing that is very easy to observe is that Lightroom color model is a good deal different from the Photoshop RGB model. In the Photoshop color formation there is a clearly visible patterns, like 0-0-255 and 0-255-0 which are linear relationships. Increasing the red from 127 to 255 will max that channel and double the Red value. The same behavior will be observed on the green or the blue channels as well. In Lightroom color model this kind of pattern is simply not there; different hues are formed with a different formula as you can see in the percentage numbers. The only place where the pattern based behavior is visible is on the gray scale patches. [Read more...]
Hallelujah! It’s About time!
July 27, 2011 By 3 Comments
An advertising watchdog group in Britain has banned two overly retouched L’Oreal ads featuring the actress and model, claiming that the digitally altered images are misleading, the Daily Mail reported.
The Advertising Standards Authority in the U.K. is demanding that the company pull a two-page magazine ad Roberts did for Lancome, one of L’Oreal’s makeup brands, claiming that the actress’ flawless skin is too good to be true.
A Great Resource For Photographers
June 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment
NAPP, National Association of Photoshop Professionals has been around for quite some time now. Its founder Scott Kelby and his cohorts, Matt Klaskowski, Dave Cross, and others publish a very fine magazine, Photoshop user, and offer online content in variety of formats.
I have been a NAPP subscriber for many years, and also joined the sister service KelbyTraning.com a few years back. I like the group not only because of the fine magazine and the NAPP Web site, not only because they bring varied programs to their members from shooting to outputting, but also because they bring unique programs like A Day With jay Maisel. I enjoy following these programs, that alone is worth the money. But I also want to support them by my membership so that they continue offering their rich resources to me and photography fans all around.
[Read more...]
Flora
Infrared Earthscapes
Junk Yard