What do Vladimir Putin, George Bush, and Helen Clark all have in common? Answer: they have all been subject to Photoshop treatment and hang on the wall at Silk Factory No. 1 in China's industrial city of Suzhou. But why is New Zealand's Prime Minister hung between the presumably more influential leaders of Russia and the USA? How many people passing through the factory shop even know who she is? Apparently Clark is an "old friend" of the Chinese President, having been a strong supporter of China's entry into the WTO.
Continue reading 'IOTW: Leaders wear silk jackets'
Tag archive for 'photoshop'
Why do Adobe products cost more to download than buy off the shelf in Europe? Why do they cost way more than they do in the US? Do US upgrades work with UK products? Why doesn't Adobe respond to Customer Support e-mails? Good questions: now here for the answers...
Continue reading 'A conversation with Adobe'
If you walk past an electrical retailer with a row of TVs in the shop window, you'll notice that the skins tones and other colours look different on each set. The differences may be subtle, and no TV is necessarily any more "correct" than any other. But each TV will have a control that lets you tweak the colour until you match what you are seeing with what you expect to see i.e. colour management (color, if you don't speak standard English).
Continue reading 'Colour management basics'
If you produce high-quality images (e.g. by means of a raw conversion workflow), you may find that they are unsuitable for e-mailing or display on the web as JPEGs in their present form. They may be of a large dimension, high-resolution (e.g. 300 dpi), high bit-depth (i.e. 16 bits/ channel), with an unsafe colour profile (e.g. ProPhoto), not enough compression, and be a bit fuzzy after re-sizing. You could open each individual image that you want to re-purpose in Photoshop and change the pixel dimensions, the resolution (to 72 dpi), the bit depth (to 8 bits), the colour space (to sRGB), the quality (e.g. to 8 cf. 12), and apply sharpening. But there is a much easier way using Photoshop Actions and Automator...
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Well, not for dummies—but for non-professional photographers, amateurs, or prosumers (as you like). This article represents my evolving understanding of the options you have during raw conversion with ACR 3.1, and during post-processing in Photoshop CS2 (following nearly 3 years of shooting JPEG, ignoring colour management, and tinkering with Photoshop 7). I like a "one product does it all" solution. I descibe a workflow that will hopefully make sense for most images—assuming that like me you want to work on one at a time, to edit once, and your interest is in capturing what's there and not "faking it". I'll make changes as I discover what does or doesn't work, and acquire new knowledge (maybe even skill?). Your feedback and suggestions would be much appreciated. This is a fairly long article, but there's a graphic summary at the end!
Continue reading 'A raw and CS2 workflow for dummies'
I've already looked at raw ability in Photoshop CS2, together with image editing features for post-processing. The question is should I upgrade to CS2 (from Photoshop 7 and Elements 3) when my Nikon D70 arrives, or spend similar money on Nikon Capture instead. How do they broadly compare in terms of features? At this point I'm not interested in technical subtleties, just a broad feature run-down for Joe Average.
Continue reading 'Photoshop CS2 vs. Nikon Capture 4.2'
