Single-Serving Photo

You remember the National Association of Photoshop Professionals? NAPP? Their president, Scott Kelby, is like the Photoshop guy, he teaches Photoshop and Lightroom and travels all around the world doing seminars and evangelizing for Adobe (in an indirect way, as a representative of over 30,000 people who use Photoshop professionally). He’s as close to a Photoshop guru as you can realistically get before you become Thomas Knoll or Russell Brown.

What I’m trying to say here is that you really couldn’t learn Photoshop (or Lightroom) from any better folks than Scott Kelby and his Photoshop crew (Corey Barker, Pete Collins, RC Concepcion, and of course Matt Kloskowski). Normally this type of instruction costs a few bucks or at least a trip somewhere. But not this week.

This week only, presented in a live format, Scott and his crew (he calls them “The Photoshop Guys”) are doing a series of retouching presentations that you can watch for free. This starts tonight at 6 PM EST. The presentations are, in order:

• Wedding Retouching (tonight, Dec. 5)
• Digital Makeup (Dec. 6)
• The Next Level of Retouching (Dec. 7)
• LIVE Show – Audience Participation in Q&A (Dec. 8)
• Tips from the Industry (Dec. 9)

My understanding is that the fourth presentation is the only time that The Photoshop Guys will take any questions directly from the digital audience, but all five presentations will be streamed live.

To tune in, just visit Retouching Week on Photoshop User. It looks like the video and chat feeds are having some problems at the moment, but since the event has not yet started I’m sure the IT screw at Photoshop User will be able to work out all the bugs before it gets underway tonight at 6.

I don’t know about you guys but I’ll be tuned in!

Photoshop. The program that became a verb, a lifestyle, an indispensable tool. The first time I ever used Photoshop, it didn’t have layers. Now it feels like the third hand I never knew I wanted but couldn’t reasonably live without. I have used it seriously and continuously since version 4 and as much as I love free and open source software, there is absolutely no replacement for it.

Few people in the world know any of this better than Scott Kelby. As the president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (by the way, you know your software is influential when a 70,000-member association springs up around it), he is intimately in touch with the pulse of the Photoshop user and the photography industry. (more…)

And by “strike” I definitely don’t mean in the “strike out” sense, but in the “I just struck gold” sense. The other day I posted Tricks for Shooting High-Key Macro wherein I link to a cool in-studio tutorial by Atlanta photographer Alex Koloskov. Alex and his wife run AKELstudio in Atlanta, Georgia and are now literally brain-dumping all of these great tutorials and behind-the-scenes views onto the Internet and I’m loving every minute of it.

Genia, AKELstudio's Photoshop Mastermind

Anyway, I really enjoyed Alex’s high-key macro behind-the-scenes and some of his in-studio video tutorials on shooting products under water (if you want to check that out you can read it here), and then I found out that his wife, Genia, is actually the Photoshop mastermind behind all of AKELstudio’s post-production and has her own blog, too!

You may not know this about me, but my first contact with Photoshop was in my middle school’s computer lab. They had version 2.5, which was the first version that shipped for Windows and also the last version that didn’t have layers. Version 3 was shipped in 1994 and introduced layers for the first time. I have been using Photoshop on and off since then, and almost on a daily basis since version 5 or so. Needless to say, I’m sort of a Photoshop junkie. To say that I “like” Photoshop would be an understatement.

Another thing that has really excited me lately is HDR (or compressed dynamic range, as it should properly be called, but that’s a discussion for another time). I just caught wind of this article Genia posted back in June of outdoor HDR images that Alex photographed and she put together using Photomatrix Pro (my favorite HDR program, by the way, you should buy it from Amazon right now) and Photoshop.

Go and check out this HDR images. I really appreciate HDR that you can’t quite tell is HDR, though Genia does enjoy the more exaggerated HDR effects as well, which is cool, I’m into that. You can hover your mouse over each image to see one of the exposures from the “before” that contributed to the final version.

You can do so much with Photomatix, I would highly recommend giving it a try. You can download a trial version from HDRsoft and if you like it, please please please buy it from Amazon so I can keep paying my web hosting bills.

High Dynamic Range Images Before and After via The Perfect Photo Blog

I have a question to ask you. What do Santa Claus, this portrait of Lincoln, and great daytime television have in common?

That’s right, they’re all mythical. Well, actually, the portrait is real inasmuch as it physically exists, but it’s one of the earliest (now rather famous) examples of photo manipulation. It turns out that although the photo seems to depict a stoic Lincoln standing beside a writing desk, the only thing in that photo that is actually Lincoln’s is his head. The body is that of Southern politician John C. Calhoun.

Apparently, so few “heroic” portraits of Lincoln existed (perhaps because Lincoln was weary of posing for them) that the only logical alternative was to fake it. In addition to pasting Lincoln’s head onto Calhoun’s body, the text on the papers visible on the desk were changed from “strict constitution,” “free trade,” and “the sovereignty of the states” to “constitution,” “union,” and “proclamation of freedom.”

So who needs Photoshop, anyway?

Via Museum of Hoaxes

I know I talk a pretty serious game most of the time, but I also like to have fun now and then. I recently stumbled upon a pretty hilarious series of videos by a guy named Donnie Hoyle called “You Suck at Photoshop.” They’re basically Photoshop tutorials, but presented in a rather cynical, somewhat spiteful, and utterly entertaining way.

Trust me, if you have a few minutes, just watch one or two of these and you’ll see what I mean. I should mention that there is some coarse language, so try not to get in trouble watching these at high volume in the office, OK?

• You Suck at Photoshop #1
• You Suck at Photoshop #2
• You Suck at Photoshop #3

I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.