Photo&Cameras

This is the first of a series of reviews that will cover what is contained in the Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) Master Collection. When Adobe released CS4 fall 2008, they not only released single version products, but also six separate suites of products. They are Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, Web Standard, Production Premium, and Master Collection. You can go online to compare what is contained in each version. The goal of this series it to define what each product does and provide information on what the new version brings to the table.

What do you need to run Adobe Photoshop CS4? On Windows you need an 1.8GHz or faster processor, Windows XP SP2 or Vista; on Mac, a PowerPC® G5 or multi-core Intel processor, Mac OS X v10.4.11 – 10.5.4 (Leopard), 512 MB RAM, 1,024×768 display (1,280×800 recommended) with a 16-bit video card, 2GB hard drive space, and DVD-ROM drive.

Just like with the previous version of Photoshop, this latest version also comes in two editions: the standard version of Photoshop, and Photoshop CS4 Extended edition. The extended version is targeted to professionals in film and television, manufacturing, architecture, engineering, medicine, and science.

Photoshop CS4 is the graphics editor that is developed and published by Adobe Systems, the market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation. It was originally developed by Thomas Knoll, and later with the help of his brother John Knoll, it was first introduced in 1990. Photoshop CS4 is version 11.

Photoshop CS4 is a raster graphics editor. That is it is an editor that allows users to paint and edit pictures on a computer screen and save them in one of many popular raster file formats such as JPEG, PNG, GIF, and TIFF. The other popular image editing format is a vector format. Adobe Illustrator is a vector image editor.

So what is new with Photoshop CS4?

• Adjustments Panel – will save time when you are making non-destructive adjustments. The Adjustments panel eliminates the need to navigate through a dialog box maze of menus and it presents everything in one place. The Adjustments panel puts everything right at hand. It even contains the new Vibrance adjustment control that will give you greater control over your color saturation while still preserving your delicate tones. The panel also allows for modifiable preset for each type of change, including more than 20 preconfigured customizable starting points.

From: feeds.blogcritics.org

Read the rest of this entry »

Photojournalism: The Professional's Approach is a large book in more ways than one. Sure, it's a hefty book at 512 pages, but it also has another kind of weight: the weight of responsibility. Photojournalism as a practice has an accountability that goes beyond judgment and values; the photojournalist becomes our eyes to the world, and must try and capture only the truth and not impose his or her own judgment on an event.

Photojournalism, now in its sixth edition, features interviews with leading professionals along with many examples of fine photojournalism. This latest edition has been revised to include international pictures and stories as well. This book contains everything from hard news to sports to features in its eighteen chapters.

Chapter 1, "Assignment," examines where most dramatic news stories come from. No, it's not from the city desk of some newspaper, but rather from the vigilant photographers who monitor the emergency scanners waiting for the next breaking situation. These photographers may just sit in their cars near a crossroads monitoring multiple scanners, hoping to be leaving the scene already by the time everyone else is just arriving. Also discussed in this chapter are other resources that can be used to track down news stories, including PR departments, websites, TV, and a good contact list.

Chapter 5, "Portraits," concerns the journalistic portrait. These are photographic essays that tell the story of a person. In this chapter, you see what it takes to put a person at ease so that his or her real personalities can emerge in front of the camera. Some of the tips offered include knowing when to talk and knowing when to listen, and even knowing when to bore the subject so that he or she stops posing and starts relaxing.

Chapter 7, "Photo Editing," takes the stance that when someone examines multiple images, he or she spends less than three-quarters of a second looking at an individual photo. The challenge becomes finding the right image out of hundreds – possibly thousands – of images that will communicate a story in a meaningful way. In this chapter you learn about theories of picture selection, research on reader preference, how to work with images, effects of cropping, working with space in an image, the size of image, and how to work with captions.

Chapter 11, "Photo Story," is about telling a story using pictures. This is the ultimate professional experience for many photojournalists. Some stories can take minutes to develop and others can take years. Here you learn how to communicate a story with pictures and words, including the different formats of photo stories, and the equipment that you will need to do things right. Also included in this chapter are a number of professional photo stories as examples.

From: feeds.blogcritics.org

Read the rest of this entry »

In an earlier review, I looked at X-Rite's new product called the ColorMunki which really blew me away with the quality and performance of this product. Over the course of several articles, I will now look at X-Rite's all new i1 product line that was just showcased at the photokina in Cologne Germany in September and at Graph Expo in Chicago, IL in October.

There are two fundamental paths that you can take with the i1 line, i1 Basic and the i1 XTreme. The i1 Basic, which is marketed as an affordable, upgradeable, professional spectral color measurement solution and monitor profiler. With the i1 Basic, creative and prepress professionals can scan spectral color, obtain accurate color on all displays, linearize their printers through support of leading RIPs, and easily add new profiling functionality to meet their growing needs with new affordable upgrade modules.

In this first part I will look at is the i1 Basic. In future installments, I will look at the modules that can be added on to the i1 Basic or can be purchased as a whole with the i1 XTreme.

What does it take to run the i1 Basic?  Either a Windows 2000, XP, or Vista with a 300 MHz PC or better, or Mac OS X (10.3 or higher) Power G3 or higher processor, a powered USB port, 128 MB RAM, and 100 MB of hard-drive space.

The i1 Basic comes with the i1 Pro spectrophotometer and the i1Match Monitor profiling software. The i1 Basic will let you scan spectral color and obtain accurate color on all of your displays. You will be able to linearize your printers and by purchasing upgrade modules, and you can add profiling functionality when you need it.

When working with the i1 Basic you can profile CRTs, LCDs, and laptop displays. There are two modes available to you. The first is easy mode which will give you a quick accurate profile based on the defaults for your type of display. Advanced will let you choose the setting and really drill down for a much more accurate profile.

From: feeds.blogcritics.org

Read the rest of this entry »

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0 is the latest release from the Adobe Photoshop family. Although it's the little brother of the industry standard digital imaging software product Adobe Photoshop, it is also a pretty powerful product in its own right. While it is aimed at the more novice user, over the course of time, it has gained the necessary features to stand on its own merit.

While the latest version of Photoshop has been announced – in this case CS4 – and Photoshop is considered by many to be the best image editing product on the planet, it is certainly not for everyone. For the professional, Photoshop is a must have, but it is not always the best product for the casual user or amateur for a couple of reasons. First, with a high end product, there is usually a high end learning curve that can take months, even years, to master. Second, a high end product usually comes with a high end price. In the case of Photoshop CS4, purchasing it new can mean $649.00 USD for the standard version, and $999.00 USD for the extended version. For Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0 the price is $99.00 USD, or bundled with Adobe Premier Elements 7.0, it is $149.00 USD.

What do you need to run Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0? Currently it is only available on Windows. If the past is any indication, a Mac version should be scheduled for a future date. So on Windows you need a 2 GHz or better machine with 1 GB of RAM, a mouse, a 16-bit color display with 1024×768 resolution at 96DPI or less, a DirectX 9 compatible display driver, a CD-ROM, and around 1.5 GB hard disk space available. The web features require Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or 7, or Mozilla Firefox 1.5 through 3.x

So what is new with this version of Adobe Photoshop Elements?

• Interface Brightness – can now be customized in both the organizer and the editor so you can control how bright the interface is with regard to your images. By using the brightness slider, you can make the screen as bright or dark as you would like. This will give you the ability to see your images in their proper light.

• Streamlined Downloading – now has no separate Photo Downloader icon in the system tray. All connection events have now been consolidated into the Windows Autoplay list where you can choose to either use the Adobe Photo Downloader, or launch another program.

From: feeds.blogcritics.org

Read the rest of this entry »

Last August, Adobe released the second incarnation of their photography workflow product Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 to rave reviews. As is to be expected, Martin Evening has updated his bestselling book The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book to enhance his existing material as well as to reflect all of the changes to Lightroom 2.

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers has been significantly updated and, as with the prior version, it was written with photographers in mind, addressing Lightroom's features from a professional photographer's perspective. This version is 624 pages in length (a whopping 272 additional pages of material) and contains 11 chapters (encompassed in 5 additional chapters).

Chapter 1, "Introducing Adobe Photoshop Lightroom," begins by describing exactly what Lightroom is, and where it fits in within your image processing workflow. Lightroom is a high quality image processer and photographic image database management system rolled into one. In this chapter you will learn about installing Lightroom as well as all about working with the Lightroom interface. Chapter 2, "Importing Photos," explains that because Lightroom is a catalog management system for your images, the first step is that you need to import images. Next you will learn about all of the options that are available to you such as converting images to Digital Negatives (DNG), using Adobe Bridge as a front end, and how imported images are organized.

Chapter 3, "Navigating the Library Module," now begins the journey into working with the various Lightroom modules beginning with the Library. This first look at the library module examines how you to use it to navigate the photos in your catalog. You will also see what tools you have available to refine your image selections. Chapter 4, "Managing Photos in the Library Module," shows you how to organize and catalog your images. Then you will see how it provides a flexible system of file management so that you can really work with your images through file naming, custom metadata, and adding keywords so that you can optimize your searching capabilities.

Chapter 5, "Working with Catalogs," examines how to work with the catalog system in Lightroom. The catalog plays a central role in Lightroom in that it keeps track of where all of your images are located as well as the information that is stored with your photos. Chapter 6, "Develop Module Image Editing," explains how to use one of the most powerful features of Lightroom, the develop module. It is this image processing module that records the changes that you want to make to an image. It stores these changes within the system, but it waits until you actually export an image before it applies the changes.

Chapter 7, "The Art of Black and White," now takes a look at how to transform your images into Black and White. Here you will learn the three main ways to convert an image as well as how not to convert your image to Black and White. You will also see specialized techniques such as creating a Black and White infrared look. Chapter 8, "Sharpening and Nose Reduction," takes on the topics of capture sharpening and noise reduction. This chapter emphasizes that importance of cleaning up an image early on, and what it takes to get that pre-sharpening done without introducing artifacts.

From: feeds.blogcritics.org

Read the rest of this entry »

As with a lot of books, Take Your Best Shot is one that has been years in the making. While working with the nature photographer George Lepp, Tim Grey started a quarterly newsletter called "Digital Darkroom Quarterly." Over time he kept getting questions via email asking questions on digital photography, and many times these questions were the same or similar questions. So instead of just responding to these questions, in 2001, he started the Digital Darkroom Questions (DDQ) email newsletter. To this day, these questions still go strong. Tim Grey's latest book, Take Your Best Shot, was developed from these questions. The book is 252 pages in length and is divided into 10 chapters.

Chapter 1, "Digital Fundamentals," begins with question topics that will help give you a strong foundation in digital photography and help shorten your learning curve. The goal here is that even if you have the basics down, by reviewing some of these topics you will even pick up a point or two. Topics covered here include the debate between film and digital, dynamic range, ISO, resolution, RAW capture, and lens problems such as chromatic aberration.

Chapter 2, "Digital Cameras and Tools," examines the wild and wonderful world of ever expanding digital technology. In the days of film cameras, things did not change that frequently, but with the advent of digital, things don't stay the same for very long. Now you have many choices that constantly change. Here you will learn about the differences in camera choices, cleaning sensors, memory cards, lenses, and even about some specialty accessories like Lensbabies lenses.

Chapter 3, "Digital Capture," is really a new technology in the grand order of things, and so we are all still trying to define the rules. While there are a lot of similarities between this technology and film, there are also a lot of differences. This can lead to frustration. In this chapter the author attempts to remove those frustrations by examining some of these new rules. This includes comparing RAW to JPG, why to shoot RAW, setting color temperature, when to change ISO, what color space should you use on your DSLR, and how to interpret the histogram on your image.

Chapter 4, "Digital Darkroom," is a place that you will likely spend a lot of time if you are serious about digital photography. The digital darkroom needs equipment much like the traditional darkroom, but it is dry and performed in open spaces (and it does not have that chemical smell). To build a system, there are also a lot of questions to be answered such as Windows vs. Mac, storage and backup, do you need Photoshop? Do you need Lightroom? As well as many more topics examined. Here you will get a good feel for what you might need.

Chapter 5, "Color Management," examines why there are two kinds of photographers with regard to color management; those who are frustrated with it, and those who ignore it. Topics here try to look at how to manage color. Questions answered here are about profiling camera, calibrating monitors, color spaces, how to use print preview in Photoshop, as well as color management in Photoshop.

Chapter 6, "Optimizing in Photoshop," will help you overcome the learning curve that one generally finds when learning Photoshop. In this chapter the author examines many of the common questions that people have when working with Photoshop. These include working with RAW files, Curves and Levels, Cloning and Healing, Adjustment Layers, Selections, and working with Gradient Effects on an Adjusted area.

From: feeds.blogcritics.org

Read the rest of this entry »

Creating portraits is a combination of skill and technique. It is also about connecting with your subjects. By learning how to observe and understand those you are working with you will get a feel for who they are, and how best to present them in a personal light. Learning to find out what interests you about your subject will allow you to better capture their personality.

It also takes time to learn the creative techniques of composing your images by experimentation, and through the capturing a lot of images; by learning how to tell a story with your image. Portrait and Candid Photography is 272 pages divided into 10 chapters.

Chapter 1, "What You Must Know About Photographing People," begins by showing you how to observe and connect with people. Here you will learn how to compose your images, to see what your eyes see, and learn about working with light in general. Then you will explore the kinds of equipment cameras, lenses, and equipment you will need. Chapter 2, "Accessory Equipment," will now take you into more detail with equipment such as additional lenses, batteries, tripods, flashes, and other odds and ends.

Chapter 3, "Working with Light," will get into more detail about working with light by exploring the quality, direction, intensity, and color of light. Then you will see how to reflect light, defuse light, work with a flash, and work with a meter for exposure. Chapter 4, "Composing your Picture," examines the basics of composition. This includes working with colors, framing your image, using patterns, using perspective, focus, and point of view.

Chapter 5, "Taking Portraits," will have you creating the look that you want by choosing the correct background, adding props, and adjusting wardrobe. You will see how best to take advantage of light, see how best to work with your subject by experimenting with position, changing points of view, and even how to capture candid moments. Chapter 6, "Families, Groups, and Parties," begins by showing you how to prepare for the shoot. Again you need to know the location, the people, the lighting, but it is just as important to anticipate surprises.

page 1 | 2

From: feeds.blogcritics.org

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first article in an occasional series on collecting.

First editions of scarce, time-worthy publications by known authors, or which covered newsworthy events, are fetching five figures on the market. As with any collectible category, low-print editions, special editions, autographed editions, or otherwise scarce or hard-to-come-by editions can command even more. Also like any collectible, condition is paramount. Please bear in mind that I’m not plugging any particular company, in spite of this article’s focus, which I use as an example.

Genesis Publications is a London-based company, a part of which specializes in publishing collectible manuscripts or, in this case, photographs that for the most part have not been publicly displayed previously. Genesis searches out and capitalizes on scarce and rare collectibles, making them even more collectible by the use of special bindings, low print runs, autographed copies, etc. Like any worthy collectible, this volume shows provenance by including something that the millions of other copies extant do not have:  original, authentic signatures, in which case it is bound to be the most desired and probably net the highest sale price.

Genesis has just announced a special edition, limited to 1,000 copies, of a book entitled Easy Company, 506th PIR, In Photographs. The book is signed by seven surviving members of the US Army unit whose World War II story was told in the book and movie entitled Band of Brothers.

The photographs and story follow the men of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, a part of the famed 101st Airborne Division. (The 101st was also the unit to which another famous American was assigned: Jimi Hendrix.) The book follows the men's brave, valorous exploits, beginning with training at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, through additional training in England, D-Day, and the invasion of Nazi Europe. From there, the men move through Normandy, Holland, and Belgium, engage in the Battle of the Bulge, and, in their final wartime triumph, capture Adolf Hitler’s Alpine fortress, “The Eagle’s Nest.”

The book contains 400 photographs and 20,000 words of text, with a foreword by Tom Hanks, and reproductions of maps, literature, and pamphlets from the era. As editor Alex Hedley says, “This book speaks for itself – all you need to do is look through to realize what an astounding group of men this was.” It is available only through Genesis Publications.

This volume is bound in medium-grain black leather, and has hand-tooled gold lettering on the spine. The backing boards of the book are bound in US Army M1942 8-ounce cloth, which is what the uniforms of the soldiers were made of. A replica of the unit patch for the 101st Airborne Division is embossed on the front board. The edges of the 232 pages are gilded, and each page is of heavyweight matte art acid-free paper.

Idea Generation, the public relations company for Genesis Publications, has also gained recent press coverage from mounting the first UK exhibition of photographs by former Rolling Stone photographer Robert Altman. More recently, The Fame Bureau announced a planned auction featuring the original Beatles recording contract, signed by all four members of the Beatles and their manager Brian Epstein, dated 1 October 1962, which is expected to bring in at least $500,000. Coverage of this 4 September event at the Idea Generation Gallery will be my next article in this series.

From: feeds.blogcritics.org

Read the rest of this entry »

Based on the device-independent CIE specification from 1976, Lab color is often thought of as a high tech, labor-intensive color space. In many cases, Lab color performs certain types of color modifications more quickly and with better, more effective results than RGB. In Photoshop CS3 Mastering Lab Color, Deke McClelland explores how to use Lab color "to make bad photographs great and great photographs even better." He demonstrates image manipulations that are best suited to Lab, and walks through a typical, non-destructive Lab correction. Deke also shows how to correct lighting, apply selective color modifications, and reverse the effects of color cast.

Your trainer for this library is Deke McClelland. In 1985, Deke McClelland oversaw the implementation of the first personal computer-based production department in Boulder, Colorado. Deke McClelland is a well-known expert and lecturer on Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and the broader realm of computer graphics and design. To date, he has written 85 books that have been translated into 24 languages, with more than four million copies in print. This library is divided into five lessons and runs six and a half hours.

Lesson 1, "What Lab Color Is" begins with defining what Lab color is. Designed decades ago, Lab color has been available in Adobe Photoshop for over 10 years. Unlike the RGB and CMYK color spaces, Lab color is an optional color space but is often overlooked or considered too difficult to use but can save time and can make your images look better.

Here you will learn not to fear the Lab mode, you will learn why color is 3D, how to mix Lab colors, as well as other explanations of what Lab Color is. You will learn about the hue/saturation color wheel, the Lab color wheel, the different channels between the three color spaces, and how channels blend in Lab mode.

Lesson 2, "What Lab Color Can Do", at least according to McClelland, is "blow your mind." It will have a profound effect on your images, it will surprise you with its power, and it will just simply amaze you. This is where you will see how bad becomes great, and great becomes better. You will see how to favor yellow to balance skin tones, drop out the blues, correct a very bad image in Lab, sharpen luminance independent of color, and sharpen for effect and blur away noise.

Lesson 3, "A Typical, Nondestructive Lab Correction" now focuses on more realistic problems — not making the bad great or the great better, but rather how to make the okay or average image much better. You know those images where the colors are drab, the contrast is lackluster, or other problems where the image does not live up to what you saw when you pressed the shutter release. Here you will see a more typical scenario in which you convert an image to Lab and apply adjustment layers, turn the image into a smart object and sharpen it and turn that into an RGB image to resolve the chromatic aberrations — all without harming a pixel.

page 1 | 2

From: feeds.blogcritics.org

Read the rest of this entry »

In an effort to promote photography, the release of his new book, and, indirectly, the release of the latest release of Adobe Lightroom, author, publisher, and all around nice guy Scott Kelby is hosting the first ever Worldwide Photo Walk.

Scott Kelby's Worldwide Photo Walk will take place in two weeks on August 23, 2008 and is happening in over 200 cities around the globe. Covering six continents and twenty-four time zones, photographers will be hooking up for a free, social photography event to take pictures, meet new people, get a little exercise, and have an excuse to do what they like doing best.

What is a photo walk? In its base form it is the act of walking with a camera for the main purpose of taking pictures of things that a photographer may find interesting. It's similar to street photography, but the main goal here is to take pictures of things as opposed to people. Along with the ability to meet people and socialize, because it is done in a group, photo walking allows people to be less self-conscious about taking pictures in the open, on the street, and perhaps allows them to get pictures that they might have missed ordinarily.

As I said there are more than 200 cities taking part, the final tally of cities will be released on Monday on Scott Kelby's blog. You can check out the list of cities to see if there is one near you. Each walk is hosted by a professional in the area, and the areas walked are diverse. Each walk will be approximately two hours long and will end up at a restaurant, café, bar, or other establishment for additional socializing, and chimpping; if you don't know what chimpping is, I guess you will have to watch the video in the link at the bottom. Keep in mind that each walk will be limited to 50 people, so if you want to attend, sign up early.

At the end, the best photos that you take will be uploaded and there will be prizes awarded. The grand prize consists of:

• The Adobe CS3 Creative Suite Premium Package
• The New Adobe Lightroom 2
• Two full conference passes to the Photoshop World Conference & Expo
• The new Wacom 6×11 widescreen tablet
• A $500 gift card for purchases online or in-store at B&H
• From Mpix – Two 20"x30" color prints/Kodak Professional Portra Endura Paper
• From Peachpit – A $250 book bundle

Other prizes, like Adobe Lightroom 2 and copies of Scott Kelby's new book Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers, will be awarded as well.

Many of the people from NAPP are leading walks around the country, and while I am not leading one, I will be attending the one in Oklahoma City and I am really looking forward to it. If you want more information on the free Worldwide Photo Walk, or would like to watch a short video about the photo walk, check out the Photoshop User site.

From: feeds.blogcritics.org

Read the rest of this entry »