Adobe MAX 2011 was held in Los Angeles recently, and in this video above they demonstrate a new image deblurring technique which the crowd seems to be amazed by. Quality isn’t great but check it out.
Photoshop is just going to do everything for us soon.
Many of you probably don’t know that Adobe have their very own online TV Channels dedicated to all the software products they develop and obviously that includes Photoshop. The shows they have on their website are very educational and typically in tutorial form. They are also presented by a varying number of well known and respected Adobe evangelists including one of my favourites, Russell Brown who I also had the pleasure of meeting in Las Vegas. Russell is part of the team at Adobe and is an excellent instructor. He’s a real pleasure to watch and you will learn a bucket load. You can catch a huge amount of his tutorials on The Russell Brown Show.
So head on over to the Adobe Photoshop TV Channel here and start watching some tutorials! That will keep your weekend busy!
As for my tutorials, well I’ve been plotting out some new ones, I just need to find some time to create them. Stay tuned.
B.
Ok so creating a new tutorial weekly is a bit too much for my workload, so I’m going to open up Photoshop Friday to be more diverse and I will do my best to get as many tutorials done as I can. Keep sending in your requests! So to start off with this new direction I wanted to give you photoshop enthusiasts a little bit of inspiration from an Australian based company with an amazing portfolio; Electric Art.
I stumbled across this talented group of individuals quite a while ago now and they produce some amazing creative artwork for the commercial and advertising spaces both here in Australia and in the United States. This is definitely something to go check and out to try and help those creative juices flowing.
The image above is a screenshot from their website, so head on over to http://www.electricart.com.au to see all those images up close.
Have a good weekend!
B.
I just love cinemascope. There’s just something about the ultra widescreen format that gets me all excited. Cinemascope for those that don’t know refers to a very wide aspect ratio cropping like you see above, usually around 2.35:1 (or 2.39:1) and is common to feature films you see on the big screen. My interest in films has passed through into my still photography work and this is a perfect example of that. I like to create images that look like they could be from a movie. So this usually means having a cool concept to start with, then retouching and grading it extensively in photoshop, and spitting out an image with a cinemascope crop to give us what should look like something from a movie.
Above is Tiffany Baker, my Ninja Assasin. I have owned these two swords for a long time and I’ve been dying to use them for something ever since. I actually picked them up off a friend who was moving house and wanted to throw them out. I thought to myself… these would be great props for a shoot! So all this time later I finally found a use for them.
We did a bunch fo diffenent poses for this shoot but i tried to find the ones with more serious facial expressions. To me, without a good facial expression you have no picture. This one just made the cut so I popped it open in Photoshop and had a play. Would love to know what you think! Perhaps I can address some of the photoshop elements in a future photoshop tutorial if there is any interest.
Here is the before image straight from the camera.
Here is a slightly larger version to have a look at:
Today I would like to share this image with you which is my very first creation of 2011. The model is Tiffany Baker and we were aiming for some kind of grungy, hardcore ninja-assasin look. I own these swords and I’ve been dying to use them for ages, and Tiffany fits this character perfectly. The building we were meant to shoot in just happened to have all roads leading to it closed on the afternoon we wanted to shoot. So instead, we managed to find a little pine forest nearby and we adapted to it. It worked out ok in the end so that was good. The background ended up getting removed as you can tell in this shot anyway, but it proved useful in another shot coming to the blog real soon.
Click to read the full article and see the Before photo…
I spent a lot of time with Ally Hayward(above) in Sydney late last year and here is yet another creation from the two of us. Just quickly, in case you haven’t already seen it, you might want to check out the other amazing creative shot I posted of Ally not so long ago which is on the blog right here. It is probably my favourite shot from 2010 and is definitely going on the wall at home.
Moving on to this image though… This is part of the same series I guess you could say. It’s a little rough around the edges and has some flaws but who cares I like it. Try not to look into it too much and you will too. I gave up working on this one as I wasn’t happy with it so I just released it as it is. Read on for information about how it was taken and to see the before shot….
I have been so extremely busy preparing for some upcoming photo/video shoots that I have been unable to record this weeks photoshop tutorial but here is something far more interesting to watch!
Russell Brown is a Senior Creative Director at Adobe Systems and is a very well known Photoshop Evangalist. Russell is always entertaining the crowds at all the major conferences around the world with his quirky presentations and tutorials. Below is a video of his presentation which is a tribute to the 20th Anniversary of Photoshop, held at a gala in The House of Fine Arts in San Francisco on 18 February 2010. A little while back but you need to watch it!
He truly is entertaining and if you have used photoshop over the years you will love this video and his creative ability.
Russell Brown at the Photoshop 20th Anniversary from SLY on Vimeo.
See you back next week for another Photoshop Tutorial!
Shooting glamour doesn’t really give me a lot of opportunities to get overly creative in Photoshop, and being such an avid Photoshop user I have started looking for more creative outlets, hence this image above. You may remember Ally Hayward above from a prior blog post with some very hot glamour images we took together in Sydney. See the photos HERE. We teamed up a second time and experimented with a little Angelina Jolie styled action.
This photo was taken with 2 strobes firing off an Elinchrom Ranger RX Speed AS kit. To the left of camera just in front of Ally was an Elinchrom 53″ Octa, and I placed a bare strobe behind her to the right. Shot on my 5DMKII with a 70-200mm IS 2.8 L series lens.
I gave Ally a nice retouch on the skin but kept as much texture and enhanced the details as best I could. I desaturated the photo except for a tiny bit of purple in her hair which I saturated. The ray of light is purely thanks to a little photoshop trick I learnt from Calvin Hollywood. Then a bit of dodging and burning as well as applying a texture to her surroundings and I was done in Photoshop. In lightroom I then applied a split tone effect. I applied a blue hue to the shadows and a yellow tone to the highlights but it was very subtle. A gentle vignette finished off the image.
Stay tuned for more images in this series!
Today I’m bringing you an article written by Photoshop Guru Matt Kloskowski which featured on Scott Kelby’s Photoshop Insider blog. The article was titled “Is Photoshop a bad word”. The article raises argument over how a lot of people dislike photoshop, think its cheating, and whatever else. He raises some excellent points, and so do some of the readers in the comments section so make sure you read it all.
I think I would tend to agree with a lot of the things he says in this article and it’s the reason why I am pro-actively building up my photoshop experience. I think Photoshop is part of the game now, and you need it if you want to compete. Everyone owns a camera these days, and it’s becoming harder and harder to stand out from the crowd every day.
I also found it very very interesting when he said, that some things should be left to fix in photoshop. Depending what it is, it doesn’t have to be perfect in camera every time, especially when you are on a strict clock and have a lot of people working. Time is money. People always say its better to get it right in camera, but the reality is in a lot of situations, it might just be better not to waste everyones time and handle it in post. I know this is very dependant on what and who you are shooting.
Don’t get me wrong though, I think so many people abuse photoshop.
Anyway, I am so glad he wrote this article because he is someone who you are all more likely to look up to than if I wrote it. I want you all to read it HERE.
B.
Installing Photoshop is pretty easy right? We have a disk we simply insert into our computer or we download the whole install through new-age speedy internet and we are using it very quickly.
Can you imagine having to install Adobe photoshop from a floppy disk? When I say floppy disk, I actually mean 358 floppy disks! The folks at Antrepo did some calculations and worked out how many floppy disks it would take to install some new software applications such as iTunes and more.
What a pain that would be!
What a huge first day, and it isn’t even over yet! The training has finished for the day but there are still some activities to take part in. Personally, I am going to be attending the After Party @ the House of Blues located in the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino which is also where I’m staying. Before we get to that though, you can probably notice from the photo above there was a KISS theme for the opening keynote and it was hilarious. The entire keynote presentation was really well done and it was good to hear from some Adobe head-honchos.
Attended some really good classes including Calvin Hollywood and Russell Brown’s presentation where I was also napping a few Behind The Scenes pictures for Calvin. The classroom was packed out which was great! I took a bunch of pictures which I will post probably tomorrow in another blog post.
So the after party looks to be a very interesting night with some food and drink provided and a chance to meet a few more people from this great event. I’ll check back in and finish this post when I get back…
…. few hours go by…. then a few more ….
Well I was going to finish this post off once I returned from the after party to wrap up day one, however things didn’t quite go to plan. I just got back to my hotel room and its 6:30am the following day, but what a night! I guess that’s the effect of Vegas for you! So with my travel buddy Natalie, and Calvin Hollywood we attended the after party as planned and it was great! The food was actually pretty tasty and we were able to get a few free drinks! Plus Scott Kelby and the gang put on a fun performance with their band that rocked the house. It was really interesting to meet a few more people such as the great Wacoom staff, which by the way sold me on a new Wacom Intuos4 tablet. Met some other great folks including a young budding photographer Jake Peterson (yes, son of legendary wildlife photographer; Moose) and Im really enjoying some of his aviation photography work, check out his blog here. Also had a nice chat with photoshop guru Matt Kloskowski and I met Nick Saglimbeni from Slickforce Studios too. So after the after party, lets just say things started getting a little bit messy and i’ll leave it at that. Now when is the best time to gamble? When you’re completely intoxicated of course! So a couple of us were off to the Luxor poker tables to have a bit of a gamble. Against all odds and what you might think, it actually turned out to be a good idea! I doubled up on my money!
More from me in the coming days direct from Photoshop World in Las vegas.
B.
I think a stage comes in every photographers career when they finally find the courage or the need to jump in front of the lens for that famous self portrait shot. Well that wasn’t the case here. I was actually just in desperate need of a subject to test out a new concept I wanted to try. So when you can’t find anybody else, you just have to resort to using yourself!
I made a little setup with a few strobes in the backyard. Once I was happy with the lighting setup I manually focused on a spare lightstand, setup the timer and plonked myself in the frame for some test shots.
Once I loaded them up on the computer and I just couldnt help myself. I had a bit of a soft spot for one of the images and so I threw some basic Lightroom adjustments into it and sent it straight over to Photoshop to give the image the full treatment. I modified it to my liking and the end result was pretty impressive and I was proud to have a nice new portrait for myself.
However I was still a little bit bored and needed an avenue to demonstrate some digital enhancement ability so I basically tore apart my face and had a bit of fun with a terminator concept. Sure, there are inconsistencies with it if you look hard enough but it looks cool and was a bit of fun! Read on to see the before and after photos…
A day with local Perth singer Johnny Ruffo
Today I wanted to share a couple of images I did for Johhny Ruffo, a seriously talented Perth singer who's in the middle of putting his first album together. I've been lucky enough to score a preview of a few of the tracks and I think Johnny will be someone to watch out for!
Getting Accurate Colours using ColorChecker Passport and Lightroom
Now using a grey card can help you achieve a correct white balance, and will also help remove any colour casts that may be present in an image. However, what if you want to go one step further and take full control over all your colours in your image? Make sure your RAW files are converted accurately. Well let me show you how I do it. I use the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport.
Testing my HDSLR Car Rig for video
I've always wanted to strap my 5DMKII camera to a car and record something. Well my new car rig enables me to do exactly that! I recently put together a rig for taking still images of a car at low walking speeds (more on that later), but I wanted to step things up a bit and build a rig that was more secure and could handle filming while driving around!
