Hidden Gems In Photoshop CS5 – Bryan O’Neil Hughes

October 23, 2011 | Leave a Comment

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.

View more Photoshop videos here.

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Category: Video - Photoshop
Tags: bryan o'neil hughes, cs5, Photoshop

40 Free Photoshop CS5 Videos

July 14, 2011 | Leave a Comment

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 & Masking – 4 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

View more in my Photoshop DVDs.
Read more in my Photoshop ebooks.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Category: Video - Photoshop
Tags: adobe, cs5, new features, Photoshop, Video

Photoshop CS5′s Mask Panel & Refine Edge – Lee Varis

June 18, 2011 | Leave a Comment

Lee Varis details the Mask Panel and Refine Edge in Photoshop CS5.

Find out more about Lee Varis here.

Learn more in Lee’s DVD Beyond Skin.

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing DVDs.

Category: CS5, Photoshop, Video
Tags: adobe, Beyond Skin, cs5, Lee Varis, mask panel, Photoshop, refine edge, Skin

Selective Content Aware Scale and Content Aware Fill – Terry White

June 4, 2011 | Leave a Comment

Terry White demos ways to make Content Aware Scale and Content Aware Fill more selective. Both new miracle features usually succeed or fail epically. When either fails, try these two techniques.

Find more great content from Terry White here.

Learn more with my digital photography and digital printing ebooks.

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Category: CS5, Photoshop, Video
Tags: adobe, content aware fill, content aware scale, cs5, Photoshop, terry white

Get More From Smart Objects

May 6, 2011 | Leave a Comment

“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

Category: CS5, Photoshop, Technique
Tags: adobe, cs5, CS5 for Photographers: The Ultimate Workshop, digital photo pro, Jeff Schewe, Photoshop, smart objects

Stack Mode Magic – Russell Brown

April 12, 2011 | 1 Comment

Russell Brown goes deep into Photoshop Stacks.

Learn more in my digital printing and digital photography workshops.

Category: Photoshop
Tags: adobe, cs5, Photoshop, russell brown, stacks

Smart Object Basics – Russell Brown

April 11, 2011 | Leave a Comment

Russell Brown covers the basics of Smart Object. It’s must know info.

Learn more in my digital printing and digital photography workshops.

Category: Photoshop
Tags: adobe, cs5, Photoshop, photoshop world, russell brown, smart objects

Adobe’s Lens Profile Corrections

February 16, 2011 | Leave a Comment

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 …

Continue reading on Digital Photo Pro.