Archive for August, 2010

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Greyed out Filters in Photoshop…

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Filters Header Hello hello, It is Friday already and I hope you are enjoying your week. First of all, thank you for visiting the blog and reading the posts. I hope you are enjoying them. Today we have a Photoshop topic, actually a problem that occurs sometimes and people are wandering what to do. I get this question very often on the Photoshop courses are run. For those of you who are Photoshop users, has it ever happened to you that you were trying to apply a filter and it was greyed out? It happens to all of us from time to time and then you are wandering what happened and how you are going to fix this. Here is how it looks:

Missing FiltersThen you start wandering what went wrong and how to fix this, right? Are you thinking about reinstalling Photoshop? Some people do…

There are a few reasons and there are two most common ones:

  • you are in 16 but
  • the image is CMYK image (not all filters are supported in CMYK)

Changing the colour mode or bit mode will fix the issue and you are ready to go! :-) This was a quick tip for you for a weekend! Remember, Monday is Photoshop Lightroom Tv day!

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Installing Photoshop CS5 – shall I keep CS3…?

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

Adobe photoshopHello everyone, it is Thursday already! The time flies :-)

Quite often I get asked this question from people on my Photoshop courses:

” I have just installed a new version of Photoshop (CS5 or CS4) and I still have CS3 installed. I don’t need both versions. Shall I remove CS3? Is it safe to uninstall it?”

Yes, you can uninstall previous versions of Photoshop, the new version is not dependent on the old version. You can safely uninstall it. You  may want to deactivate it before you uninstall so you could install it again if you need it later on.

If you use an old computer, try CS5 or CS4 out first and see if you are happy with it. It may not run that well on the old hardware, it is being optimized for new hardware in computers.

To De-activate it, go to Help -> Deactivate…  in Photoshop.

Just to confirm once again, multiple versions of Adobe software can co-exist without any issues. This means that you do not need to uninstall CS3 (CS4) if you want to install CS5.

I hope it helps :-)

Have a great day!

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London Photoshop Lightroom Group meeting

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

Photoshop LightroomGood morning to everyone,

I would like to start by thanking everyone who came yesterday to the meeting of the London Photoshop Lightroom Group at the Crosse Keys – it was great fun and it was fantastic meeting all of you! I hope we will have more and more people coming.

In the near future I will start running a series of workshops on Lightroom – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Masterclass as I did have requests from people interested in coming. That’s great! :-)

More info on the group website – London Photoshop Lightroom Group.

We will have some more exciting meetups quite soon including a meeting with Steve Caplin – a Photoshop artist.

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Fixes for Lightroom 3 coming soon

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Hello everyone,

I know that many people were complaining about the performance of Lightroom 3 and I have found out from the guys from Adobe that there are some fixes coming soon.

There will be a fix for a mistake in the way cached previous are being build. This should especially get noticed while browsing through the images in the Loupe View on a big monitor.

As Adobe says: ” There’s may still some memory buildup issues in Develop to root out, especially around the caches used to improve interactive performance while brushing and spotting, but there’s more analysis to be done there and as with any caching we have to be careful not to slow things down by caching too little. ”

We should get some more information quite soon.

As soon as I know more, I will inform you here so stick with me.

For now, have a fabulous day and till tomorrow! :-)

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Automatic Virtual Copies in Collections

Friday, August 6th, 2010

Virtual Copies

Good morning to everyone!

Today, a Collections in Lightroom topic. I heard some people saying that after working with Lightroom for a bit they suddenly realize that they have a lot of virtual copies in their Collections. They say  that something creates virtual copies from many files.

The solution is very simple. When you create a Collection, in the dialog box that appears there is an option: Make New Virtual Copies that may be selected. Just deselect it and you’re done! :-)

Here is the screenshot:

Virtual Copies in Lightroom

That was a quick tip for you today! :-)

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New Lens Correction in Lightroom

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

Lens Correction

Hello everyone. I am pretty sure you have heard about the lens correction  that detects your camera/lens and tries to adjust the issue (unless you have been living in some remote place than you may not have heard about it… ;-)  ).

When you import the images into Lightroom, it tries to detect the camera/ lens combination and correct the lens distortions.

The Metadata  for identifying lenses is becoming a standard but it is not yet. With the recent release of EXIF 2.3 it comes closer however there is no official standard of writing the lens metadata so sometimes Lightroom may not get it right and may not know what lens was used. Adobe is working on it all the time and they are bringing more lens profiles even though some “popular” lenses may not be there yet.

Even if your lens is not there yet, you can manually adjust controls or you can build your own profile using Lens Profile Creator. There are quite a few lens profiles already built in into Lightroom 3. A screenshot below shows the profiles for Canon:

Lens ProfilesThere are quite a few profiles for Nikon users as well:

Nikon Lens ProfilesIf Lightroom cannot identify your camera/lens correctly, it will not apply  any profile automatically.

I hope this helps.

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Create your own Export Preset

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

Export Presets

Hello everyone. I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s post and I hope you enjoyed yet another Episode of PhotoshopLightroomTV.

If you haven’t watched it yet, head on to PhotoshopLightroomTV website and watch it.

Today a topic of Exporting images from Lightroom. This is one of the most often used features in Lightroom. At certain point in time you will need to export your images whether you want to email them or print them etc. So after selecting the images for export, just click on Export button in the bottom left corner of the Library Module:

Export in LightroomLightroom comes with a set of presets for Exporting images but you can also create your own presets. It is even useful to save some of your export presets so it is easier to reuse them as you frequently export images.

The way to do it is to set up all the settings on the right side and then press Add button in the  Presets Panel of the Export window. This will bring New Preset dialog box where you can name it and add it to your User Presets folder:

ExportThis is an easy way to create your own presets for exporting images for Email, blog or printing them.

I hope you enjoyed it. :-)

Have a great day!

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Steve Caplin and Photoshop CS5

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Steve Caplin at Foyles

Good morning to you. I hope you had a fabulous weekend and are starting a fantastic week! :-)

Today I want to share with you information about a fantastic event coming to London soon.

At the end of September  (on the 29th) Steve Caplin will come to Foyles to bring us some more fantastic stuff in Photoshop, this time Photoshop CS5 so we can expect some fascinating new techniques.

Meet me there and let’s greet Steve and show him some appreciation for all the awesome work he does.

If you missed his previous appearances, you need to come! He is a great Photoshop artist. An event for Photoshop fanatics to learn new 3D skills or for anyone interested in the visual design that constantly surrounds us and the programme that creates it.

You can find all the details here:

Steve Caplin Event – Photoshop CS5.

The Event is free but you need to reserve your place as there is limited seating. All details on the page above (link above). I am going to meet other fellow Photoshop enthusiasts, so feel free to join us. You can also join my London Photoshop Lightroom Group. We will all meet before the event at Foyles cafe.

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