In this episode of The Complete Picture Julieanne explains the best way to add a color tone to an image using the Split Tone and Tone Curve panels and shows how to save presets to increase your productivity. You can download the presets discussed in the video via Julieanne’s blog. Note: although this video was recorded in Lightroom, the same techniques are available in Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CS6.
Check it out:
“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool?…” Um, this? Core77 writes,
Danish shooter Ebsen Nielsen has made the latest advancement: After cobbling together an octo-copter from several different manufacturers’ kits, he rigged up a way to send a live feed from the camera to a pair of goggles he wears, enabling him to fly it from a first-person POV.
In a related vein, how about a climb up Pakistan’s 20,000ft Trango Towers? Stick around (or skip) to about 1:30. #HNL
[Via]
Pilot Jakub Vlk captured & accelerated footage out the front of his aircraft:
[Via]
Better still, a seagull kept pace by taking off with a running GoPro!
Photo Plus Expo is drawing a range of Adobe folks & expert artists (Julieanne Kost, John Paul Caponigro, Dan Marcolina, Bryan O’Neil Hughes, and many others) to New York. Check out some of the interesting talks going on all week.
“The simplest way to describe Richard [Koci Hernandez],” says my friend Michael Ninness, “is that he is the ultimate evangelist for new storytelling tools.” Richard spent many years working as a photojournalist for the SJ Mercury News before becoming a professor at Berkeley.
Now he’s put together a full-throated defense ostensibly of using Instagram, but really more about democratized image-making, the value of filtering/manipulation, and more. I think you’ll find it interesting:
It’s said to be “30% smaller, 25% lighter & 2X more powerful than previous models. New resolutions and frame rates include 4K @ 15fps, 1080 @ 60fps, and 720 @ 120fps. It also offers 12MP burst photo capture at 30 fps.” Oh, and it has built-in WiFi, for $399 (or down to $199 minus some resolutions/rates). Wild.
fxphd writes,
While much of the popular press may focus on the jump to 4K, we wanted to flag the incredible shift from being a ‘straight to YouTube’ camera to a camera that now also offers a very real alternative for those wanting to intercut GoPro footage – a pipeline that assumes there will be grading, that there will be post, and outputs from the camera in a format that lets you maximize both.
[Via Colin Stefani]
Shahab Gabriel Behzumi shot for six days, then produced this rather eye-popping piece.
He writes,
I had to import and customize the NEF files before I equalized them with the great LR-Timelapse from Gunther Wegner. (Adobe Lightroom is necessary) The observed JPEG had then to be droped into virtual dub and were rendered as AVI. When this was done, I had to stabilize the sequences manually frame by frame (AE motion tracker) and rendered each of them in 3 different sizes: (4928×3264 pixels, 1920×1080 pixels, 1024×768 pixels) Last but not least the snippets were edited fitting to the beautiful title “Diving Through The Blue” by the respectable composer and musician Valentin Boomes.
“Ross Ching, the director,” writes Gizmodo, “used Adobe Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere to delete every human and moving car from all the timelapse sequences. His short, the first of a series called Empty America, shows every landmark from the Golden Gate Bridge to Fisherman’s Wharf to Lombard Street to Ghirardelli Square to the Bay Bridge, ‘wiped empty of tourists and traffic.'”
Here’s a peek behind the scenes:
Pro tip: You can shoot videos like this any day of the week here in San Jose (population 1 million) and never need to do any post-processing. “It’s more necropolis than metropolis,” says my wife. [Via Dave Helmly]
Getting the weekend off to a rather fast start:
[Via]
Julieanne Kost writes,
In this episode of The Complete Picture (The Graduated Filter and Adjustment Brush), discover the power of making selective adjustments like dodging and burning, color corrections and noise removal using the Graduated Filter and Adjustment Brush. Note: although this video was recorded in Lightroom, the same techniques are available in Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CS6.
[Via Jeff Tranberry]
The Digital Negative format lets you convert your proprietary-format raw files (NEF, CR2, etc.) into a format that’s fully publicly documented (more future-proof). Now the standard has been extended to support 32-bit floating point data (capable of representing hundreds of f-stops of dynamic range), plus optional lossy compression (JPEG-like sizes with the flexibility of raw), and more. Check out the DNG 1.4 specification notes on the Lightroom Journal for more info.
“So what do you do,” asks Brad Kremer, “when you have a day off and a $300,000 camera package sitting at your house? Invite all of the neighborhood kids and throw a water balloon party of course! Duh!”
Having enjoyed this sort of thing with stills, I’d love to try it with high-speed video. [Via Mark Kawano]
Power or simplicity? How about both? PSE 11 features a totally overhauled interface & much more. Here’s a 1-minute tour:
And if you’re up for trying a bit of filmmaking, check out the new Premiere Elements:
Don’t worry: no DSLRs were, to my knowledge, harmed in the making of this music video—though boy does it test the viewer’s tolerance for motion sickness.
The filmmakers write,
The device is powered by an electric drill, constructed from bicycle and drum parts, wood and metal plates, which was strong enough to allow us to rotate the heavy weight of a Canon 5D MKII stably and at a very high speed. The drill was plugged to a variable speed controller, allowing us to adjust the speed of the cameras rotations by turning a dial.
The setting of the video is the band preforming live in a studio set. The main camera rotates at a selected speed as the band performs. While the camera is rotating, objects such as the skin of the bass drum start to rotate at the same speed as the main camera, giving the effect of those objects becoming static in the frame while everything else is spinning. When a person stands in front of these objects it gives the effect of the person spinning rather than the background.
Other circular boards with graphics are turned on and off running in and out of sync with the main rotating camera. Each of these graphics have variable speed control dials to adjust their speed.
Here’s the making-of:
[Via]
Days of miracles & wonder…
The 11 floors tower of the HESAV (Health High School Vaud) has been animated as a rudimentary screen whose pixels are, in fact, all the windows and shutters that students, staff and friends shake for hours
The second half of the vid features making-of content, and a participant writes,
[It took] Just a couple of hours with the instructions. We NEVER did all the combos you can see in the video, just twice or three times all windows / shutters positions, all together at the same time. The rest is all post production.
[Via]
I know it’s absurd, but… don’t you kind of want to try a 3-ft-long iPhone?
[Via]
[Update: See also the papercraft iFaux 5.]
Well now I feel bad: Not only have I failed send any of our guys’ innumerable Thomas engines to space, I’ve also neglected to learn After Effects well enough to animate their faces. Big props all around, Ron Fugelseth.
More info about the project is on PetaPixel.
Silly, corny? Sure. But stick with it for the weird little details—and then for the crazy descent into darkness. #prisonwife
[Via Andreas Wurf]
I couldn’t quite catch the show overhead this morning (dammit), but Lightroom team member Ben Warde more than made up for it. Check out his shots.
Adobe has done an excellent job fitting its leading image editor to the tablet form factor… Snapseed may offer more effects and photo fine-tuning, but Photoshop Touch is a different animal, offering a fuller set of image-manipulation tools, which earns it our Editors’ Choice for tablet-based image-editing apps.
How great is this?? Designer Megan Orsi writes,
When I was in high school, I spent every waking moment in Photoshop creating websites and collages for my favorite show, The X-Files (don’t laugh!). Thankfully, all of the time I spent paid off and now I’m able to use my Photoshop skills on a daily basis doing a job I love. Photoshop’s been a big part of my past, and now, it will always be a part of my future. Thanks, Adobe 😉
Hope everyone enjoys the Photoshop Toolbar Tattoo =D
Fantastic. (Your move, Goran Peuc. :-)) [Update: Tom Hogarty has posted more info about & from Megan on the Photoshop team blog.]
[Via Mike Giordano]
The editing & soundtrack verge on the assaultive, but it’s still cool to see so many examples of this technique overlaid in quick succession:
[Via]
Photographer/evangelist Terry White talks about how he uses Lightroom’s “publish to Revel” feature to keep an up-to-date set of photos on his iPad & iPhone, ready to display. Check out the full story.
Julieanne Kost shows how to apply a tilt-shift look to a series of images:
[Via Jeff Tranberry]
“I instaGRAM, I don’t instaF’AROUND!!”
[Via Sharad Mangalick]
A neat, simple Kickstarter project:
Dig that heart-shaped button.
Adobe’s photo-sharing & -editing tool, Revel, introduces a range of features in the new version 1.5:
- Albums to organize photos:
- Create an album on one device and it is automatically updated and accessible everywhere you have Revel.
- Share albums on AdobeRevel.com as web galleries.
- Captions – Add context to memories with text descriptions.
- Library grid view – Browse photos in track or grid view.
- Sign in with Facebook or Google ID – New Revel users can skip the hassle of remembering a new password by simply signing in with an existing ID.
Check out how Revel is great for families, and browse a sample gallery here.
Get the app from the Mac App Store and the iTunes App store and start your free 30-day trial. (Even if you’ve done a trial in the past, you can start a fresh one today.)
Apropos of nothing, I’ve always loved the titles for HBO’s late & un-lamented John From Cincinnati. What a great evocation of time, place, and flavor. RIP Joe Strummer.
I was enthusiastic about the “social collage” tool Mixel when it launched last fall, and I was sad to hear last week of its impending demise. It didn’t stay down long, though, reappearing today as an iPhone app:
The previous incarnation emphasized more open-ended creativity, and in many users’ hands it often produced ugly results. This new version emphasizes more constraint & automation (“It does all the hard work of making your collages for you”), producing more attractive (if less flexible) results.
The notion of visual conversations has changed as well. It seems the team has moved away from the notion of remixing others’ artwork & is instead supporting replies (e.g. you share a collage, & I and others can add on our own–but we don’t start those by messing around with your creation). That’s probably a smart pivot, though some part of me still wants to think that when it comes to collaborative art-making, there’s a “there” there.
All in all it’s great to see Mixel continuing to evolve, and I like what I’ve been able to make so far.
Self-proclaimed “pale, gray creature” (i.e. photo retoucher) Becci Mason spent three weeks helping in Japan in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami. Soon after she turned to restoring photos lost & found in the wreckage. PetaPixel writes,
Within 2 weeks after putting out a call for help, she found herself with 150 volunteers willing to offer their time and services. Half a year later, the Photo Rescue volunteer count had ballooned to 1,100.
In the end, Mason’s efforts led to over 135,000 photographs being cleaned, and hundreds were retouched and returned to their owners.
Fantastic work.
To be a 57-year-old, highly regarded astronaut-scientist in orbit at this moment & yet to bring this level of boyish wonder to appreciating the natural world—well, I think Don Pettit must be doing something right.
[Via]
After the success of my Lightroom Instagram Presets, which led to multiple requests for Photoshop actions, they’re finally here! All 17 of Instagram’s filters are available to simulate the Instagram filters. They’re easily applied and just $5, the price of a latte or an app on your phone. Any money that I make from these sales will fund my travels to photograph beautiful places around the world.
And no sooner did I queue up this post than I saw that Petapixel has created their own set of Instagram presets & templates. Truth be told, I haven’t had a chance to try either set of tools, so I can’t speak to their relative strengths.
Here’s a neat peek inside the AP’s ongoing hunt for new, fresh perspectives. I’m kind of charmed by the (now obsolete) approach of having some farmer-tanned dude jump into the pool to retrieve memory cards. Check out Wired for more details.
Julieanne explains what’s going on with embedded previews, etc.
Russian photographer Vadim Trunov may well have the best-lit back yard/Jurassic Park Nano in the world, judging by his terrific macro photographs of snails and insects in the rain.
Amazing capture from Tom Warner:
Check out NASA’s Astronomy Site of the Day for more details. [Via]
“Every frame in this video is a photograph taken from the International Space Station,” writes creator Knate Myers. “All credit goes to the crews on board the ISS. I removed noise and edited some shots in Photoshop.”
[Via Jim Goldstein]
“For the past five years,” writes the Daily Mail, “photographer and adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University Gordon Stettinius has been sending intentionally awful portraits of himself dressed as one of more than two dozen creepy-looking characters, as follow-ups to industry professionals.”
In related news, Gordon Stettinius is the man. [Via]
A pair of interesting little Photoshop-powered projects:
Check out a lovely bit of filmmaking (dig those close-ups & sparks) featuring dirty-snow aerial mayhem (you’ll see):
[Via Justin Cole]
Photoshop’s venerable Crop tool got a major overhaul in CS6. In this 2-minute Quick Tip, Julieanne Kost demonstrates how to quickly crop two images to the same size using the Front Image option as your source.
The folks at T-RECS shot some lovely nighttime time lapses around the US this spring.
The creators have also created a tutorial on how to make your own star trails in After Effects. [Via]
Julieanne shows a powerful but totally hidden photographic enhancement new to Photoshop CS6:
[Via]
Nice:
If you use Lightroom to edit the photos you use to create MOO Business Cards (or MiniCards or Postcards), your life is about to get just a little bit easier.
With our newly created Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Plugin you can now export your photos directly to MOO. Yay!
The master demos some amazing lens-correction tech:
I had fun using the feature the other day, warping a little panorama I’d first stitched in Photoshop.
Sorry for the late notice, but if you’ll be in San Francisco this evening, you can meet photojournalist Bruce Haley & view his work at Carte Blanche gallery (973 Valencia) 6pm-8:30pm tonight. The Facebook event page features more details.
Taken between 1994 and 2002, Bruce Haley’s photographs reflect the complexity of land and life in the former Soviet Bloc. Decaying industrial sites and toxic landscapes, rich farmland and traditional villages: his images capture the joys and challenges facing these newly independent nations, as they struggle to leave behind the legacy of Communism for an unknown future.
Bruce Haley
Bruce Haley is the recipient of the Robert Capa Gold Medal, one of the most prestigious photography awards in the world. Haley received this honor for his coverage of Burma‘s bloody ethnic civil war.
The $.99 app does what it says & does it nicely, if rather slowly. Check out some example images.
Aside: I continue to wish Apple would make it easy for apps like Instagram to slot in other apps for round-trip filtering (sending them a grid of pixels & then getting one back). It seems that Windows & Android remain well ahead in this regard, but hope springs eternal.