Learning Photoshop

For more than a year, Photoshop was the bane of my photographic world. I wanted to learn it, but each time I tried, I came away feeling frazzled, inept, and not too bright. I just wanted to master the basics. Perhaps I could learn to remove small distractions from an image or brighten a dark spot. For example, I took a picture of a couple with their dog, and an upturned chair in the background made it appear as if the dog had horns.

Picture before PhotoshopPicture before Photoshop
Many of my friends could use this program, so I began with optimism. First, I took a class. The instructor cheerfully zipped though his list of topics, while I watched, listened, took notes, and tried to follow the steps on my laptop. That didn’t work, though, because while I took notes, I missed details, and while I was trying to find a tool or command, he was often moving on the next topic. I finished the class but recognized that I needed to find another way to learn the program.

Continue reading Learning Photoshop

Convert any photo into an illustration

Here’s something we’ve never tried before here at Photodoto.com: a tutorial screencast. This screencast shows a fast, fun, and easy way to convert any photo into an illustration. Please let us know if you had any problems viewing it. Also, leave a comment if you like the screencast format and would like to see more posts like this one. Thanks for watching!

Click To Play

Links in this screencast:

  • Inkscape – free vector graphics application similar to Illustrator, Freehand, Corel Draw
  • Click here to view a higher quality Quicktime version of this screencast.

Here are the before and after photos shown in this screencast:

Before

After

Continue reading Convert any photo into an illustration

Get sunset and sunrise times for any location on Earth

Sunset/sunrise tables screenshotPhotographers know that the best light of the day usually happens at sunrise and sunset. I’m happy to announce the availability of a helpful utility that lets you use a map to find your location on the Earth and then instantly creates a table of sunset and sunrise times and moon phases.

Choose one of the dozens of pre-set locations or create your own custom location (with precision right down to the street level, if you like). The last location you selected on the map is automatically restored the next time you visit the page making it extremely easy to get up-to-date information.

Get sunset and sunrise times for any location on Earth

Continue reading Get sunset and sunrise times for any location on Earth

Google adds facial recognition to image search

Ars Technica is reporting that Google has quietly added basic facial recognition features to their image search. There is no user-interface for it yet and it can currently only be accessed by appending &imgType=face to an image search. Here’s an example (I’m on page 2): John Watson

Still in the experimental stages, this would obviously be a killer feature to add to Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, Google’s photo management application. It would be huge to be able to identify people in just a few photos in your collection and then be able to search for all photos with those same people. Riya.com has had something like this for a while with its “People” tab.

Google’s addition of this feature is a shot across the bow of every other photo sharing service out there. I can only speculate that Flickr, Smug Mug, and other photo sharing services are working on similar features. They’d better be because this is the sort of thing that will make sorting through thousands of photos of people much easier than it has ever been before. I for one would love to be able to sort out pictures of just my kids,

Continue reading Google adds facial recognition to image search

Do a DoubleTake on Your Photos

How would you like to turn your 6 megapixel D100 into a 17 megapixel super D100 for less than $20? You can if you use a Macintosh running OS X. Well, maybe it really won’t actually turn a D100 into a 17 megapixel camera, but you’ll be able to create images of 17 megapixels or even larger relatively painlessly.

Enter a progrom called DoubleTake for Mac OS X. It’s a handy little shareware gem that does a stellar job of stitching images together to form a huge photograph that’s ideal for printing at up to poster sizes with incredible detail.

Continue reading Do a DoubleTake on Your Photos

The “Beauty Function” For a More Beautiful You

Beauty FunctionYou just can’t believe anything you see these days.

Researchers from Tel Aviv University have created a computer algorithm that “beautifies” a photograph of a person’s face by making subtle adjustments to ratios that correlate with an objective definition of beauty. As a photographer, you are probably familiar with some of these mathematical formulas (The Golden Ratio) although you may not have thought of applying them to human faces.

It’s inevitable that software like this, for better or worse, will find its way first into products like Adobe Photoshop as a plugin and then eventually into digital cameras. One day, you may even ditch your old-fashioned glass bathroom mirror for a self-esteem boosting all-digital model.

Check out the before and after photos and read the full article at Israel21c.

(via Kottke.org)

Continue reading The “Beauty Function” For a More Beautiful You

How to Preserve Your Photo’s Colors on the Web

Have you ever uploaded a photograph from your computer to a photo hosting site or your blog and find the colors seem less or more vibrant and just generally not as impressive as you see on your monitor?

When I first started posting my photographs on the web to sites like Flickr, I noticed that often the colors would look less vibrant and subdued when I viewed them on my browser. Somehow they seemed to lack the pizazz and zip they have when viewing them in Photoshop.

Continue reading How to Preserve Your Photo’s Colors on the Web

REVIEW: Picnik.com online photo editor

Picasa was the first online editing software that I heard people rave about, but I was left out of the fun; I couldn’t use it from my Mac. I still can’t, because I haven’t upgraded to 10.4, so I’ll never know what all the fuss was about. However, now I can play with Picnik.com, so I’m a happy camper.

Continue reading REVIEW: Picnik.com online photo editor

Adobe Lightroom Beta 4

So I’ve been using the Adobe Lightroom beta for a couple of weeks now and I really like it. It’s shaping up to be a very nice application and it’s clear that the designers have put a lot of thought into managing a workflow that involves a lot of photographs.

I was using Raw Shooter Premium (RSP) to process my RAW files but I’ve made the switch completely to Lightroom even though it is still in beta. For one, RSP isn’t being updated anymore. It was acquired by Adobe and they’ve promised RSP users a free upgrade to Lightroom 1.0 when it becomes available. Second, even now it provides a lot more fine-grained control over image adjustment than RSP does. The Develop panel looks like a 747 cockpit. But importantly, every one of those controls does something meaningful and there are no less than two basic adjustment panels you can use instead. Plus you can save as many presets as you like.

It’s certainly slower than RSP. You’ll need a semi-modern machine to run it properly. But if your computer has the horsepower, Lightroom is a lot of fun to use.

Continue reading Adobe Lightroom Beta 4