A Few Good Documents

May 1, 2011 By 1 Comment

No, it is not a movie sequel. I have just come across a few useful documents or Web sites that visitors may find helpful.

Canon In 4 Parts (maybe 5!)

Canon DSLRThe first is for digital SLR beginners, but there may be some useful information for the seasoned veteran too. It is from Canon Japan and is heavily slanted towards Canon cameras. But, a camera is a camera! Take a look here.

Canon Digital Learning Site (new and improved!)

Canon Digital Learning CenterCanon has had much material on several different locations scattered in many parts of the world. They seem to have collected a good deal under one roof. It is a rich site with layers of content, it is worth exploring (at least for Canon users.)

Using Adobe® Photoshop® CS5

Photoshop CS5Have you ever wondered if there is actually a Photoshop manual? Yes there is! In electronic and fully searchable format. As one may expect, it is in Adobe Acrobat PDF format and you can download it to your computer for future reference. Warning: Don’t try to print it, it is over 600 pages!

Adobe® Photoshop® CS5 performance

Photoshop CS5Photoshop is a complex application that can be configured to meet your needs. But what about the needs of Photoshop? If properly configured, the software can reward the user with a quicker performance. This document, direct from Adobe, explains the ins and outs of configuring Photoshop for best performance for your kind of work.

Filed Under: All Posts, Gear, Photography Tagged With: ,

Layers for Lightroom

April 23, 2011 By 1 Comment

Lightroom has become a very mature product offering easy and powerful workflow for photographers. I now do much of image processing in Lightroom pushing the image to Photoshop for features that are not available in Lightroom. One of the tools that I often miss in Lightroom is the ability to use layers, blending modes, and masking. Although Lightroom offers some local adjustment tools, like gradient fill and local brush tool, they are no substitutes for layers-based adjustments.

Perfect Layers from onOne SoftwareApparently others missed the same capability that onOne software collaborated with Scott Kelby to develop a tool called Perfect Layers. It is not available yet, but you can download a public preview from onOne software Web site and give that a try, it works with Lightroom or Aperture. I downloaded and experimented with the software. It works as intended, and for many users it may mean less need for Photoshop and money saved from that. As a Photoshop user, I did not see much benefit in Perfect Layers as [Read more...]

Filed Under: Lightroom Tagged With: , , ,

Photoshop View Print Size

March 20, 2011 By 7 Comments

Photoshop has many tricks, but automatically adjusting for the actual screen ppi (pixels per inch) to display accurate print dimensions is not one of them. You need to train the old dog for this new trick. It is quite straight forward and from that point on, when you choose “View/Print Size” it will display the actual size. Of course large print sizes may not fit the screen but you will get a good sense of proportion.

This discrepancy has two sources. The first one is Adobe settings for units which uses 72 ppi for the screen resolution although [Read more...]

Filed Under: All Posts, Photoshop Tagged With:

A New Use for X-Rite Passport ColorChecker

January 21, 2011 By 2 Comments

X-Rite Passport ColorChecker has been helping me for a while now and I am very pleased with its performance as a color managed workflow tool. I use it indoor or outside shoots and can quickly balance the white value and apply calibrated camera profile to the images. The results are richer and truer colors. So far, nothing new, many readers know that much.

I also use an Epson Perfection V500 Photo scanner to acquire scanned photographs or to directly capture images of objects, like flowers. When I capture an image via the scanner, I am not as sure of the colors as I am when the image comes from my camera. I thought the ColorChecker might come in handy and I was right. Although its use is not as automated, nor is it necessarily sanctioned by X-Rite, as it is when used with a camera, it certainly makes sense to use it in the scanning workflow. [Read more...]

Filed Under: All Posts, Gear, Photoshop Tagged With: ,

From “Scene” to “Seen”

September 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Digital photography has many more user controllable variables compared to the film. A good understanding of the variables and how to make the critical choices will reward the photographer. I used this slide presentation for a presentation I made at the Photographic Society of Rhode Island on September 21, 2010. It will make more sense to the people who were there to listen to the expanded talking points.

When viewing the presentation, advance by clicking inside the slide. You can maximize the presentation by clicking on the maximize icon, far right on the navigation bar.

Digital Workflow

Filed Under: All Posts, Lightroom, Photography, Photoshop Tagged With: , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »