Photoshop classes for photographers

Scott Condray of Visualville teaches Photoshop classes specifically designed for photographers. Since Photoshop is such a complex software, many new users become overwhelmed and do not know where to begin. Scott focuses on the tools that are specific to image editing. He keeps his class sizes small to ensure that every student fully grasps each session. Past students have told me they learned a great deal from Scott's instruction.

Scott has a 5 week course starting next Tuesday night, with spots still available. You can go to the Visualville's website for more information on how you can attend.

Our classes are designed for photographers, but are not limited to photographers. They are open to all who need to learn how to incorporate the power of this amazing software into their creative process.

• All of our classes are designed to meet the needs of photographers, both professional and amateur.
• Each class is designed to introduce students to key features of the program that can benefit both their creativity and productivity.

• Students learn at their own Visualville computer . In person instruction is supported by a class workbook of step by step exercises, and real world example images.

Photoshop Express launched

The new online version of Photoshop launched today. Although you can not do everything you would be able to do in the full version (no layers here), with Photoshop Express you can do minor spot correction, adjust exposure, set white balance, sharpening and much more. They also offer photo sharing, file storage, and a pretty extensive photo sharing community. Best of all it is free. Here is Jack Nack's run down of the features:

• Includes tools for applying spot healing, distortions, sharpening/softening, color tweaks, image filters, and more
• Offers 2GB of space for storing images
• Supports tie-ins to Facebook, MySpace, and Picasa
• Runs in any browser on Mac, Windows, or Linux using the Flash Player (v9) [Update: Sounds like there are some beta-ish glitches in some browsers]
• Will include an AIR-based desktop version (useful for editing images offline) and printing services
• Will remain free, with paid service adding more functionality

Lightroom tutorials

Staying in this weekend? Maybe you can spend your time trying out new techniques in Adobe Lightroom. Jack Nack on his blog has posted links to "a wealth of" Lightroom tutorials from the Adobe Design Center. Check them out. It should keep you busy this weekend.

Speaking of Lightroom, Stephen Shankland of CNET reports that Adobe has plans to support HDR image creation and panoramic image stitching in future versions of their software. More on that here.

'Cleanliness is next to fastiness'

Scott Byer and Adam Jerugim of Adobe gave a lecture at Photoshop World this past September about optimizing your computer's performance when working with big files. Scott has posted the lecture notes on his blog Living Photoshop. There are guides for Mac and PC settings you can change and ways to test your system's speed. Most of our customers will spend hours of their day working with large files for big prints. This comprehensive guide could help you shave off some time in your work flow. Couldn't we all use some extra minutes in the day?

Photoshop World - Heavy Lifting:

I wanted to call out a couple of things that are currently buried in the speaker notes, and I'm not sure if I got them across appropriately. First, setting Photoshop's memory percentage to 100% only makes sense if you've got more than 4GB of RAM in the machine, and again, only if you haven't run into trouble running the filters you need that way, and are on CS3. We've improved our ability to back off in the case that the machine we're on starts to page every version. However, it's still important to watch that free RAM (or, in the case of Vista, the amount still being used for the system file cache). It's important that you watch what's going on on your system when pushing things to their limit. If you're regularly seeing free memory (or the amount of free memory + system cache on vista) go below 20MB, it's time to back off that memory percentage setting and try again.

Image resizing of the future

I can't wait until this technology reaches Photoshop. It was unveiled at the 2007 SIGGRAPH seminar by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan. You must watch the video, it will blow you away. Shai Avidan recently joined the Adobe office in Newton, MA., so big changes could be right around the corner. [Via]

Color deconstructed

If you are interested in learning more in depth about RGB and color workflow, I have two good resources for you. The first is posted on photoshopessentials.com titled RGB Color and Color Channels Explained. The article breaks down how Photoshop 'sees' color and translates each color in to a number equivalent that represents what our eye perceives as red, blue, or green.

The second is a new self help guide released from Adobe that details the best color workflow in all the new Creative Suite 3 softwares. Kind of a long read, you might want to jump to page 21 if you only use Photoshop. [Via]

These articles should give you a better understanding of how color is created in Photoshop and how to get the best output from your files.

With a little help from Adobe

Who needs scholarship money if you can score some from Adobe? If you know any stellar photography or design students give them the heads up.

The Adobe® Design Achievement Awards celebrate student achievement reflecting the powerful convergence of technology and the creative arts. The competition — which showcases individual and group projects created with industry-leading Adobe creative software — honors the most talented and promising student graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, animators, digital filmmakers, and computer artists from the world's top institutions of higher education.

International prestige and valuable prizes

The 2007 Adobe Design Achievement Awards competition is open to students at post-secondary institutions in 30 countries throughout the world. First-place winning entries will receive US$5,000, a trip to attend the awards ceremony, valuable Adobe software products, and studio tours.

Show off your talent and creativity. Submit your entry now.

Photoshop goes web 2.0

Seems like there has been a lot of news coming out of Adobe recently. This one could be huge for the online photo editing market. Adobe has plans to offer a free (ad supported) online version of Photoshop in 6 months. Story by Martin LaMonica and Mike Ricciuti for CNET.

Adobe to take Photoshop online

...the hosted Photoshop service is set to be free and marketed as an entry-level version of Adobe's more sophisticated image-editing tools, including Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Chizen (Bruce Chizen, Adobe CEO) envisions revenue from the Photoshop service coming from online advertising.

...Chizen said that although hosted Photoshop is meant to be a low-end product, the company intends to ensure that it is of a higher quality than free alternatives.

Adobe Lightroom 1.0 out of beta

After a year of beta testing on their product Adobe has released Lightroom 1.0 to the public. If you are interested in purchasing, now is the time. Until April 30th you can get it for $199, after that it will be $299.

Review by bigpicture.net: Designed for professional photographers, the software allows users to import, manage, and present large volumes of photographs. Significant changes since beta 4.1 include: new advanced key-wording tools in the Library module, an improved import dialogue with more flexible file handling; an improved Key Metadata Browser; Virtual Copies and Snapshot tools in the Develop module to present multiple versions of the same image; Hue-, Saturation-, and Luminance-adjustment tools; and Clone and Healing tools to eliminate dust spots.

Lightroom features include extensive workflow support; professional editing tools such as white-balance correction, exposure, tonal curves, and black-and-white conversion; non-destructive editing; flexible viewing and comparison tools; an interface featuring task-oriented modules; automatic tracking of image changes; fast, high-quality printing; and presentation capabilities such as the assembly of contact sheets, online Web galleries, and slide shows.

The software utilizes Adobe Camera Raw technology and supports more than 150 native Raw file formats, as well as JPEG and TIFF. Once imported, files can be converted to the Digital Negative specification (DNG).

All things Adobe

Lots of new and exciting things are coming out of Adobe recently. To keep updated on their latest releases check out their Adobe Labs page: http://labs.adobe.com/

Adobe Labs is your source for early looks at emerging products and technologies from Adobe.

In Labs, you'll find early access to downloads, samples, documentation, release notes, tutorials and more. Labs also includes forums and a wiki, where you can ask questions, discuss, and share your feedback with Adobe.

Also if you are fan of Lightroom you can also check out any news and developments at a new site: http://lightroom-news.com/