Photoshop

Exposure from Alien Skin

Heather Solomon — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 13:32:00 GMT

Oh, this is just too cool.....

Use Exposure to recreate the look of a specific film stock. Control saturation, light temperature, dynamic range, softness, sharpness, and the addition of realistic grain in one place. Or save your signature look as a one click effect.

Check out the examples, very impressive stuff. All things you could do in Photoshop, but it would take more time to do it manually. Mac/Win $199 download.

Exposure

New Photoshop Brushes - Sheep Skulls

Heather Solomon — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 15:04:00 GMT

These are just cool. In my line of corporate work I could never use them unless I am doing some side project for an alternative rock band, but they are still pretty wicked.

Grungy Skull Cracks Photoshop brush (I especially dig this one)

Sheep Skull Photoshop brush

Photo Editing Step-by-Step

Heather Solomon — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 13:33:00 GMT

So I haven’t blogged much this week, I haven’t had any awe inspiring revelations to contribute. But I did do some photo retouching recently and I thought I would share, as it goes back more to my roots, and roots are good. I took two pictures and combined elements of one into another to achieve a satisfactory portrait for Christmas.

Originals:

And the final:

I step through everything I did here in this article:

A Photo Editing and Correction Instance Explained

Adobe announces Adobe-Macromedia software bundles

Heather Solomon — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 17:21:00 GMT

Via Jan Kabili over at theunofficialphotoshopweblog:

Adobe wasted no time after closing its acquisition of Macromedia to announce its first joint products: Adobe Design Bundle and Adobe Web Bundle. These are just what they sound like — bundles of Adobe and Macromedia products without any addition integration. A third bundle, Adobe Video Bundle, is expected in early 2006

Adobe Design Bundle, which sells for $1599 at the Adobe Store, includes Adobe Creative Suite Premium 2 (Photoshop CS2, InDesign CS2, Illustrator CS2, GoLive CS2, Version Cue CS2, Acrobat 7.0 Professional, and Bridge) and Macromedia Flash 8 Professional. Adobe Web Bundle, which sells for $1899, includes Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium and Macromedia Studio 8 (Dreamweaver 8, Flash Professional 8, Fireworks 8, Contribute 3, and FlashPaper 2). Education prices are a much better deal—$549 for the Design Bundle and $599 for the Web Bundle. There are also some upgrade deals from Adobe Creative Suite 1 (Standard or Premium) and Macromedia Studio MX and MX 2004. There is no upgrade path from stand alone products, like Photoshop, to a bundle. If you recently purchased Adobe Creative Suite 2 and want a bundle instead, Adobe suggests in its faq PDF, that you try to return CS2 to the location from which you bought it.

Hmm, glad I haven't bought CS2 yet. Return it? What crappy customer service.

Photoshop to the rescue: fixing excessive contrast in your digital pics

Heather Solomon — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 12:13:00 GMT

Via Jan Kabili:

Take a look at your latest batch of digital photos. Chances are the biggest problem with most of them is lack of contrast. They look dull or muddy because they don’t have the full tonal range of black blacks, white whites, and lots of gray shades in between. That’s easy to fix in Photoshop with a Levels adjustment (pull in the black and white Input slider to the edges of the mound of data in the histogram) or a Curves adjustment (drag the curve into a classic, subtle S shape). But sometimes too much contrast, rather than lack of contrast is the problem with a photo. Can Photoshop help you there? Ben Long offers a cogent explanation of the problem and some practical solutions (like the Shadow/Highlight adjustment) in this article at Creativepro.