Entries tagged with “photoshop” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

No doubt these are tough times - times that can get one down, emotionally and creatively. But heck, are you going to let a tanking stock market sink your digital imaging creativity? Hope not! However, if the winds have been knocked out of your creative sails, here are a few ideas that may stimulate the creative artist within. At the very least, I hope they distract your from the stock market chart, which looks like a bad - a very bad - histogram.

It's a long way from photographing wet cans in an alley to the abstraction you see here. The start was a recent rainy day and photography in the recycle bin in the alley next to our kitchen door. View this image larger. Before I get to the steps in the progression, let me say that I've noticed a pattern in...

As a Photoshop instructor and author, I need to be skilled at using both Mac and Windows machines. And like most of my Photoshop instructor friends, I use a stylus and a tablet for maximum brush control. For my Mac, I use a Mac Book Pro, and I tote my WACOM table everywhere I go. For my Windows machine, I use the Lenovo W700 Think Pad. What's especially cool about this machine is that is has a built-in tablet and stylus. How cool is that.

Since the world is always changing, photography is largely about capturing states of things---scenes, objects, or people---in the process of change. A single image can intimate the before, and the after, and resonate with events to come. This sense of time is what gives many photographic images their power. My process of working on photos after they've been taken is...

Between committments at Macworld at the Moscone Center I wandered over and indulged my dome photography habit by photographing the dome in the Westfield shopping mall in downtown San Francisco. I believe the dome itself is antique, but it's placed in an entirely modern shopping mall. Cameo, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. It's easy with most domes...

The intelligent, engaged crowd at fabulous old-school bookstore Book Passage in Corte Madera (Marin County) got a preview Sunday of an upcoming Macworld event. Derrick Story moderated a panel of our digital imaging experts, Lisa Snider-King (Photoshop CS4 Missing Manual), Mikkel Aaland (Photoshop Lightroom 2 Adventure) and Deke McClelland (Adobe Photoshop One-on-One and Photoshop Channels & Masks One-on-One.) Hot topics...

Variety is the spice of life, and it is certainly part of what I enjoy about photography. Having a camera is an excuse for being anywhere and examining anything. Those of you who follow my blog or my photostream on Flickr will know that my subjects range from kids and flowers through the night landscape. I'm also intrigued with the...

We all know that shooters are some of the most difficult people to impress with an affordable holiday gift. If they really need it, they already have it. If they don't have it, it's probably too expensive for them -- so that means you can afford it? I think photographers deserve good gifts just like everyone else, even if that...

The new shortcuts in Photoshop CS4 will bring relief to some and pain to others. John Nack explains the changes and some of the reasons behind them.

O'Reilly Media has big plans for PhotoPlus Expo, October 23-25 at the Javits Convention Center in New York City. If you plan on attending the event, please note these terrific talks we have scheduled in the O'Reilly booth, #448, located in the Expo Hall.

Want to know what's in store for the next version of Photoshop (or your other Creative Suite favorites)? Without a having a public beta this go around, we've been having to glean clues about what might be in store for Photoshop "Next" from a variety of sources. Next week on Tuesday (September 23), we'll be able to see Creative Suite...

Katie Rose's theoretical due date was a few days ago even though she was actually born in mid May. Happy Birthday Katie Rose! Katie Rose in a Pink Dress, photo by Harold Davis. The pink dress was a gift for Katie Rose from her great aunt Adelaide. Phyllis wanted a photo of Katie Rose wearing the dress to send to...

Photoshop World returns to Las Vegas September 4-6. O'Reillians will be well represented.

For years, scads of readers have been receiving digital imaging guru Tim Grey's (almost) daily email newsletter Q&A called DDQ: Digital Darkroom Questions. Each email takes on a single user-submitted question to which Tim provides one of his salient, to-the-point, trying-to-un-confuse-you answers. We've collected the best of these and published them in Tim's new book, tearing up the charts at...

When you use Photoshop, nothing is more important than the ability to make selections. As a simple example, when you want to make a composite by moving a person from one background onto another, you need a way to select the person---in other words, to tell Photoshop which pixels you want to move. Besides this kind of large-scale selection, selection...

DekePod is back with an insane vengeance. Here's a behind the scenes look.

Why is this man jumping off the wall? The return of DekePod. I shot this on the set of Deke's soon-to-be-released next installment of DekePod, a podcast from our own Deke McClelland that made its first irreverent appearance a while back to great acclaim. The latest round will feature plenty of in-your-face, World-According-to-Deke information on all things digital imaging....

Deke McClelland joins the InDesign Secrets podcast, and the hosts help untangle some of the knots Deke encountered when creating his latest book in (and about) InDesign.

For most of the 1990s, the design market was shared by three programs: page-layout software QuarkXPress, image editor Adobe Photoshop, and drawing application Macromedia FreeHand. (Some shops preferred Illustrator, but FreeHand tended to be the more popular choice of page designers.) This benefited users by inspiring fierce competition between the suitors, with each doing its dead-level best to remain on...

As we get set to do the final push on Mikkel's Photoshop CS3 RAW book, this news via Adobe's John Nack is certainly timely. Although the ubiquitous Lightroom vs. Aperture debate rages on (and sometimes clouds our perception), turns out most professional photographers polled by Infotrends still use the classic Adobe Camera Raw/Bridge/Photoshop combo for their RAW workflow. No surprise...