Hidden Gems In Photoshop CS5 – Bryan O'Neil Hughes


Join Photoshop Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes for a deep dive into the hidden gems of Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop CS5 Extended, including tips, tricks, and technologies that are sure to help boost your productivity. Discover how to go places creatively that were impossible in Photoshop before CS5. Hughes will reveal many new techniques and enhancements to help keep your skills sharp and current.
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40 Free Photoshop CS5 Videos


You can learn Photoshop CS5’s new features from top pros in free videos.
Here’s a list of links to many of the top Photoshop CS5 videos.
New Features – Richard Harrington
Common Sense Enhancements – Deke McClelland
New Blend Modes – Divide & Subtract – Calvin Hollywood
Improved Selection & Masking4 Top Pros
Masking Basics & Masking Magic – Russell Brown
Mask Panel & Refine Edge – Lee Varis
HDR – 4 Top Pros
Photoshop CS5 HDR Special Effects – Jan Kabili
Improved Brush Engine – Russell Brown
Painting – Julianne Kost
Brush Tips – Colin Smith
Repousse 3D – Colin Smith / Russell Brown
Puppet Warp – Colin Smith / Deke McClelland
Puppet Warp – Russell Brown
PatchMatch – Dan Goldman
Spot Healing and Fill Tool – Dan Goldman
Content Aware Scaling – Michael Ninness
Content Aware Fill – Russell Brown
Content-Aware Fill – Bryan O’Neil Hughts
Selective Content Aware Scale and Content Aware Fill – Terry White
?Content Aware Fill / Scale / Heal? – Julianne Kost
Photoshop CS5 Bridge and Mini Bridge – Julianne Kost
New Camera Raw Feature – Julianne Kost
Photoretouching in Camera Raw – Russell Brown
Editing Smart Objects With Adobe Camera Raw – Russell Brown
Using Photoshop Stacks To Remove People – Deke McClelland
Making A Movie In Photoshop – Julianne Kost
Advantages of the DNG File Format – Julianne Kost
Helpful Hints For Creating Action in Photoshop – Julianne Kost
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Get More From Smart Objects


“Any “object” that needs the ability to adjust size and rotation without the normal limitations of layered images is an excellent candidate for Smart Objects … When doing a traditional multilayer composite, the resizing and rotation of a layer can cause image degradation. Positioning and sizing an object has to be a precise operation because if you use Free Transform to make a layer smaller and then find out you actually need it back at the original size (or bigger), you basically have to start over. The way to deal with this situation when doing a complex composite is to make those layers into Smart Objects. Smart Objects are embedded image objects that allow resizing, rotation and other select editing without changing the pixels in the object. The image layers are actually treated as a separate file embedded within the master file. You can’t do all editing on the Smart Object, but you can open the original layers as a temporary file and do pixel-level editing there and then save the changes back into the Smart Object; the changes will auto-update in the image in which the objects are embedded.” – Jeff Schewe
Read more about Smart Objects at Digital Photo Pro.
Get Schewe & Evening’s book CS5 for Photographers: The Ultimate Workshop.
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Adobe’s Lens Profile Corrections



Adobe’s lens profile corrections are simply amazing. Lens Corrections automate correction of standard lens distortions, including geometric distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignette. In addition to correcting lens distortions, this feature can also be used to adjust perspective and rotation.
 
Adobe provides support for a growing list of camera manufacturers, camera models, and lenses: Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Samsung, Schneider, Sigma, Sony, Tamron, and Zeiss.
Adobe Lens Profile Creator
If Adobe doesn’t supply a lens profile for your particular lens you have three choices.
First, you may be able to access a lens profile created by another user on the Adobe Lens Profile Creator forum. Find and share lens profiles at Adobe labs. Of course, these lens profiles will only be as good as the creators were diligent about creating them.
Second, you can visually adjust the parameters of an existing lens profile and save the new settings under a new name for future use. There’s plenty of room for user error with this method but it’s more efficient than creating manual corrections from scratch. Expect to check the results frequently when you apply these settings to different types of images.
Third, you can create your own custom lens profile with the free Adobe Lens Profile Creator utility. Download the Adobe Lens Profile Creator at Adobe Labs.Adobe Lens Profile Creator is a utility designed for photographers who want to create custom lens profiles for their own lenses. The process of creating a custom lens profile for your lens involves capturing a series of images of a printed checkerboard pattern with your specific camera and lens, converting that set of raw images into Digital Negative (DNG) file format (using the Camera Raw plug-in, Lightroom, or the free Adobe DNG Converter), and importing the raw DNG images (or JPEG/TIFF images when creating lens profiles for a non-raw workflow) into the Adobe Lens Profile Creator to generate a custom lens profile. If you create new lens profiles, you can share them with the rest of the user community on the Adobe Lens Profile Creator forums, publishing them directly from inside the Lens Profile Creator. These profiles will then be available via new versions of the Adobe Lens Profile Downloader. This is an extended and complex process few photographers will want to go through, but for those using unsupported cameras and lenses worth the time and effort in the long run.
Using Adobe’s Lens Profile Corrections
You can access Adobe’s Lens Corrections in three locations; Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom 3, or Photoshop CS5’s Lens Correction filter. (Lens profile corrections were first introduced in Lightroom 3. To get Lens Profile Corrections in Adobe Camera Raw CS5, you need to download a version that has been updated after the release of Lightroom 3. You can download the latest free update at adobe.com.
It’s far less destructive to make these types of adjustments to Raw files during conversion rather than after conversion. It’s also more flexible. (Use a smart object and reaccess the controls any time by simply by double clicking the smart object.) However, if you want to apply Lens Corrections within Photoshop, after a file has been rasterized, you can use CS5’s updated Lens Correction filter.
In ACR and Lightroom, you’ll find two tabs under Lens Corrections; Profile and Manual.
Under Profile, click Enable Lens Profile Corrections to activate this feature. Using the EXIF data in your Raw file, the software will automatically select the Make (of your camera), Model (of your lens), and the Profile (for that lens). You can use the supplied lens profiles, download a custom profile made by another user, or create your own (manually or with Adobe’s Lens Profile Creator).
Checking Enable Lens Profile Corrections will also allow you to access three sliders –  Distortion, Chromatic Aberration, and Vignetting – for manually fine tuning the results. If you like the results of one correction but not another, you can decrease or increase the effects in one or more of the three fields.
Under Manual, you’ll find controls for visually creating your own lens profile corrections …
Read more on Digital Photo Pro.
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