Like many necessary tasks, uploading your photos to your blog can be tedious: after a while, all that resizing, tagging, and watermarking gets old.
But there are lots of ways to make this process more efficient, and one of my favorites involves making your watermark a custom brush. [click to continue…]
Oil paint strokes subtly applied to the light and background change this photo.
For photographers, expanding one’s marketability has always been a familiar part of life. It is an ongoing necessity. What’s new today is the scale of marketing and range required. Internet-age, savvy consumers are after unique imagery, and the burden is on photographers to deliver it.
Sometimes, this involves taking chances. [click to continue…]
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Subtle manipulations enhanced this clean-looking image.
Beauty retouching is now within individuals’ reach.
The specialized $10 – 100,000 Barco Creator has made way for Adobe Photoshop, giving photographers a whole new avenue of earning potential, and reshaping expectations of photography. Twenty years of Photoshopping has inevitably created a new “beauty consensus,” within which the manipulated face is an integral part of advertising, celebrity, the music industry, fashion and magazines. Beauty retouching is a big business, and high-end “beautifiers” are in great demand.
Learning beauty retouching will benefit your work. But if you master it, you’ll have created new earning potential for yourself. [click to continue…]
At Photoshop World Las Vegas, one of the best seminars I attended was on how to improve your blogging techniques as a photographer. Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski, among others, gave some awesome advice. Here, I’ve distilled their talk down to 10 tips to get you going. Whether you’re just starting your blog or looking for ways to make yours better, you’re sure to find something to help you out.
1. Make It Look Good.
You could have the best content on the web, but if your blog isn’t navigable or easy on the eyes, you won’t get return visitors. Keep it simple — start out with a predesigned template (just Google “themes” + the tool you’re using, such as WordPress, to find some themes) and customize it to fit your blog’s personality.
2. Use the Right Number of Images.
Include at least one image with each post; even if the written content is great, people are way more likely to read it through if there’s a great photo or two alongside it. That said, if you’re writing a post about a particular shoot, do not include all the photos that made your edit. Pick only a handful of the very best. If you want your readers to have access to your full edit, include a link out from the post to a gallery of all the images.
3. Be Yourself!
Tone matters. While your writing should be of the best quality, blogging is not formal writing. If you try to sound overly authoritative or proper, it can come off as pretentious. Write as if you’re having a conversation with your readers. Scott Kelby sites Moose Peterson’s blog as a great example of hitting the blog tone nail on the head. And don’t be afraid to express your opinion; take a stance on your subject matter. Your readers have review sites and press releases for specs and technical information; give them a window into how a piece of equipment worked for YOU, or the pros and cons of a portfolio hosting site. Readers will return because they’re interested in what you think.
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The 5 Most Common Digital Image File Formats
One of the most confusing aspects of digital photography for some people is how to choose among all the different file types. I mean, c’mon, can’t an image just be an image? Why do we need so many formats?
Size, my friend. That’s why.
If we lived in a perfect world and we had endless digital storage and internet bandwidth, (I can’t wait for the day…) we’d really only need one file type. Big. Full Size. Ok, so may be we’d need two, if you include RAW.
Unfortunately, that day is not here yet, and so we still need to worry about how long it takes to transmit our images through cyberspace and how much room it takes to store them on our computers.
Here’s a basic primer on the different file types that you’re likely to come across and how they’re commonly used in the world of digital photography.
RAW: A RAW file is the full set of uncompressed camera data that was recorded by your digital sensor. Technically, a RAW file is not an image, it’s just the ingredients for an image, which includes all the light and color data, as well as any metadata that was applied to the file as specified by your camera settings. A RAW file must be converted to another image format in order to view it as an image. This is done through your image processing software, although the camera also has an onboard processor, which allows you to view a JPEG preview of your RAW image on the LCD screen after you shoot it. [click to continue…]
The Photoletariat loved Julieanne Kost’s Playing With Time seminar at PSW last week. Kost went through how to create and manipulate your time-lapse sequence, including some incredible special effects. One of our favorite tricks Kost demoed was using Pixel Bender to create a painting-like effect for some or all of your sequence. Check out more great Photoshop tips from Julieanne Kost.
Matt Kloskowski‘s Thursday afternoon HDR class on the expo floor provided some great tips for getting started in high dynamic range shooting. On HDR, Kloskowski noted, “It’s become a little controversial lately,” adding that the HDR capabilities in Photoshop “sucked” before CS5. “It’s gotten a lot better, which is why you’re hearing more about it.”
I caught up with Photoshop Guy Dave Cross yesterday in between his PSW Photoshop Wars competition and onOne booth demo. A friendly, down to earth guy, Cross told me about his unique approach to photography these days, and offered some fantastic advice for Photoshop users.
When I asked him what his current focus was in his photography work, Cross told me he’s come realize his style is to go out and take photos “with Photoshop in mind,” previsualizing how he’ll manipulate and transform the images he’s making. This “Photoshopotography” as he calls it allows him to be inspired not only by what he’s shooting, but also by the capabilities of the program itself. He echoed Scott Kelby’s advice about standing out from the crowd, saying about his seminar audiences, “I got the biggest feedback when I presented something that was different.” [click to continue…]
Perhaps my favorite expo setup here at Photoshop World is Adobe’s booth itself. This year being the world-renowned software’s 20th anniversary, Adobe procured computers from the past two decades running each version of the software respectively, up to the present CS5 incarnation. What a blast from the past! More photos after the jump.
Photoshop v.1!
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