Archive for August, 2010

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Bank Holiday and new Photoshop Book

Monday, August 30th, 2010

3D in Photoshop CS5 book

Good day to everyone,

Today is a bank holiday here in the United Kingdom so my post today will be short. :-)

We are enjoying our long weekend, I hope those of you who live in the UK are doing the same. Because of bank holiday, Photoshop Lightroom TV will go live tomorrow, thank you for your patience.

I have just spotted a new book from Focal Press worth noting :

3D in Photoshop
The Ultimate Guide for Creative Professionals by By Zorana Gee.

This is the first book of its kind that shows you everything you need to know to create or integrate 3D into your designs using Photoshop CS5 Extended. Remember that only the Extended version has 3D so you will need Photoshop CS5 Extended (you will have it if you have CS5 Design Premium or Web Premium or Master Collection).

It looks like  a great book and I will definitely get it! Make sure you check it out before I do! ;-)

Here is the link to the website where you can find out more about the book –  3D in Photoshop – Focal Press.

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Raw and Jpeg inside Lightroom

Friday, August 27th, 2010

Hello everyone,

If you are wondering whether you should shoot raw or jpegs, I will try to give you an explanation on how it works in Lightroom.

It is true that Lightroom is a pure non-destructive editor and even if you are working with Jpegs you are applying non-destructive editing to your images. It is also true that Jpegs are smaller than Raw (much smaller) in terms of file sizes on a hard drive.

There are certain setting you cannot change for Jpegs, f.ex. White Balance Settings. If you shoot Jpegs you are stuck, but if you shoot Raw you can play with White Balance so it doesn’t matter if you set it on Tungsten and you work outside in sunny weather – you can change it! :-)

When you shoot Raw, your images are not fully processed by your camera. Also, what you see on the back of your camera is not a real Raw file, it is just a Jpeg preview that camera generates for you.

Shooting Raw gives you unlimited possibilities in making adjustments to your images and it is not true what many photographers say that they shoot Jpegs because it is faster to give them to the clients. You can export your Raw images as Jpegs with a click on one button! So no excuses any more. ;-)

Have a wonderful day and a fabulous weekend.

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Removing EXIF in Photoshop

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Good morning! :-)

Have you ever tried to remove EXIF information from the files in Photoshop? When you take photos, your camera automatically saves all the technical information about the photo – this is EXIF. To access EXIF in Photoshop, you can go to  File -> File Info, then Camera Data category in the dialog box that opens:

File Info in PhotoshopThis displays all the information registered by the camera including aperture settings, shutter speed and even whether flash was used or not.

What if you want to remove the EXIF? The information in Camera Data category is not editable. Here is the trick:

Go to Save for Web and Devices, File -> Save for Web & Devices:

Exif in Photoshop

On the right side of the screen, under Convert to sRGB, go to the submenu: Metadata and choose what you want to include with your file. To remove EXIF, just choose Copyright or None.

I hope this helps. :-)

Have a wonderful day!

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Can I crop outside the image in Lightroom…?

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Lens Correction Header

Hello hello,

How about cropping the images in Lightroom today? Here is an interesting question:

” Is there a way to crop outside the image in Lightroom to get an extended canvas/space like in Photoshop? Is this doable?”

This is a good question and the answer is: There is no direct way to do it using Crop but there is a trick that works. Here you go:

Use Manual Lens Correction in Lightroom3:

Lens Correction in Lr 3Now,  use the Scale slider to create a border effect! When you reduce the value below 100, the image will scale showing the background. :-)

Lens Correction Scale feature

And that how it is done! I learnt this trick from Lee Jay who gets credit for the trick. Thanks Lee Jay!

Important!

You will loose resolution when you scale the image down so bear this in mind.

Have fun! :-)

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Photoshop CS5 demo assets

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

Cs5 Logo

Good morning :-)

Have you  upgraded to CS5 already?

Maybe you want to play with the new features and you would like to use demo assets Adobe used in their presentations. Here is the answer for you. Adobe provided a link people can use to download the demo assets for every Creative Suite 5 product.

There are seperate downloads for Windows and Mac users and you can download demo assets for Photoshop and all the other applications.

You can download Demo Assets from this location. These assets can be used: “for demonstration and testing purposes.” (quote from one of Adobe employees).

Enjoy! :-)

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Facebook Plug-in for Lightroom

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

Facebook plugin for Lightroom

Good morning. Today a few topics.

First of all, it is Monday and Photoshop Lightroom TV goes live! :-) I hope you manage to watch it, just go to PhotoshopLightroomTV website. The second part of Photoshop Lightroom Taster session and a usual Photoshop/Lightroom Tip of the Week! :-)

Second topic will be the Facebook Plug-in for Lightroom. It is available for Lightroom 2 and 3 so people with previous version of Lightroom do not feel left out.

Facebook Plug-in for Lightroom is the work of Jeffrey Friedl and it can be downloaded from his website. Here is the link to download Facebook Plugin. There is just one download that works on both Windows and Mac. There are some limitations to the plugin and they are imposed by some facebook limitations as such not plugin limitations. Jeffrey did tremendous job working on the plugin and it is a fantastic feature to use with Lightroom.

At the moment the plugin works with personal accounts but not with business pages on facebook due to some restrictions from facebook side.

Enjoy it! :-)

See you tomorrow.

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JPEG vs JPEG2000

Friday, August 20th, 2010

jpeg2000

Hello everyone,

I thought it would be interesting to discuss a topic on file formats today and to be precise JPEG vs JPEG2000. A very interesting topic and some of you may find some very interesting and some new information. Many users have never heard about JPEG 2000 so this may be new to some of you. So here we go:

JPEG 2000 was created by  JPEG commitee (Joint Photographic Experts Group) back in 2000 hence the name for the format. It was supposed to improve on the original JPEG format (which was created back in 1992). The standardized file extension for JPEG2000 is .jp2 and .jpx.

There is an increase in compression performance when compared to JPEG. However, because it is not a widely supported file format in web browsers, it has not become a standard (at least not yet).

Some for the features of JPEG 2000:

  • superior compression performance – artifacts are less visible
  • multiple resolution representation
  • lossy and lossless compression

When comparing JPEG2000 to JPEG, it delivers a compression gain of about 20%, higher-resolution images tend to gain more.

JPEG2000 is a licensed, but the contributing organizations and companies agreed that licenses for the core system can be obtained for free (JPEG200 is included in every Linux distribution).

JPEG2000 is supported by Adobe Photoshop (in case of Photoshop CS2 and CS3 the official plug-in for JPEG2000 has to be installed from the install disc as it is not installed by deafult).

More information on JPEG2000 website.

I hope you enjoyed it. Have a fantastic weekend and see you on Monday! :-)

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Photoshop Express on iPad

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

Photoshop Express

Hello everyone,

Photoshop Express comes to iPad!

Photoshop Express is former Photoshop.com.

Now it has been updated for iPad and iPhone users. There are stability and performance improvements. Adobe also added some iPad-specific features like  support for portrait and landscape orientations and many more.

The update has just gone online. There are plenty of new cool features that will be added soon.

For more details visit  John Nack’s blog.

Have an outstanding day! :-)

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Lightroom 3.2 Beta and Camera Raw 6.2 available

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

Lightroom 3.2 update

Hello everyone!

Lightroom 3.2 beta is now available as a download from Adobe Labs! Also, Camera Raw 6.2! :-)

They are both available as Release Candidates – what it means is that this version is well tested but may need some more testing from community before it goes into a final release (it basically means that some features may not work as expected from time to time, just be aware of that.).

What’s new? The ability to publish straight to Facebook from Library Module! This is great! :-)

There is also new camera support:

  • Casio EXILIM EX-FH100 (DNG*)
  • Leica S2 (DNG*)
  • Panasonic DMC-FZ100
  • Panasonic DMC-FZ40 (FZ45)
  • Panasonic DMC-LX5
  • Pentax 645D
  • Samsung NX10
  • Samsung TL500 (EX1)
  • Sony A290
  • Sony A390
  • Sony Alpha NEX-3
  • Sony Alpha NEX-5

There are also new profiles for more lenses supported – you can find the whole list on Lightroom Journal website. Adobe have also fixed many bugs – once again all the details on Lightroom Journal website – link above.

Have a wonderful day and see you tomorrow! :-)

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Episode 7 of PhotoshopLightroomTV goes live!

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

Photoshop Lightroom TV

Hello to a new exciting week ahead of us!

There are many new exciting news this week. There are some changes to Lightroom going on, make sure you stick with me as I am going to reveal them tomorrow… :-)

Also, remember about PhotoshopLightroomTV!

Episode 7 of PhotoshopLightroomTV goes live today! Make sure you don’t miss it! :-)

In this Episode you can watch the first part of a Lightroom presentation I did last week here in London. I hope you enjoy that!

Once again, thank you very much to everyone who attended the presentation! :-)

London Photoshop Lightroom GroupSee you tomorrow! :-)

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