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Enjoy Breathe An Exhibit Of Small Works At Alex Ferrone Gallery

Breathe
Small Works Exhibition
November 18, 2023 – January 15, 2024

Alex Ferrone Gallery
Cutchogue, New York

Saturday, December 2, 5-7 pm
Artists’ Reception
Holiday Tree Lighting and Caroling

Closing a chaotic year with a soft exhale, “Breathe” features serene, meditative photography, painting, mixed media, and sculpture to relax the senses from 2023 and help you recharge for 2024. Presented are small works under 18 inches from local and national artists including:

Bob Barnett
Patricia Beary
Arduina Caponigro
John Paul Caponigro
John Cino
Carolyn Conrad

Laura Dodson
Cora Jane Glasser
Eleanor Goldstein
Linda Hacker
Thomas Halaczinsky
Katherine Liepe-Levinson

Kathleen Massi
Scott McIntire
Wendy Prellwitz
Barbara Stein
Pamela Waldroup
Constance Sloggatt Wolf

Learn more here.

Arduina Caponigro

John Paul Caponigro

How To Use The Future Of Photoshop Filters Now

New in Photoshop 2024 Beta, Parametric filters, the ultimate guide. Colin Smith shows you all the different new filters in Photoshop and provides tips on how to make them the most useful.

00:00 Introduction
00:06 How to Get Photoshop beta
00:14 How to Use the Parametric Filters
00:36 Tip for better setup and resolution
02:17 Substance Designer
02:45 Changing and combining filters
03:24 Using Parametric Filters with Layer Masks
05:32 Lightning Round of all Filters
05:36 Black and White Vintage
05:52 Chromatic Aberration
06:12 Color
06:33 Distortion Filter
06:45 Duotone
07:06 Emboss
07:12 Glass Filter
07:44 Filter Glitch
07:56 Halftone
08:12 Hologram
08:29 Hologram 2
08:40 Oil Paint
09:11 Pattern Generator
09:45 Pixelate
09:50 Rain Filter
10:12 Scratch Photo
10:55 Snow Filter
11:13 Spherify
11:46 Sticker
12:00 Symmetry
12:33 Vintage Photo

View more from Colin Smith here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

33 Great Quotes On The Color Yellow

Enjoy this collection of quotes on the color blue.

Which is your favorite? Have one to add? Leave a comment!

“Orange is an underrated color, it’s the second most underrated color after yellow.”
– Michel Gondry

“Yellow usually means it’s not that serious.”
– Bobby Unser

“Whenever I drive under a yellow light, I always kiss my finger and tap it on the roof of the car.”
– Jared Padalecki

“I have these new policies toward my life, like ‘I will not accelerate when I see the yellow light.'”
– Elizabeth Gilbert

“The middle of the road is for yellow lines and dead armadillos.”
– Jim Hightower

“Fear has nothing to do with cowardice. A fellow is only yellow when he lets his fear make him quit.”
– Jerome Cady

“Yellow wakes me up in the morning. Yellow gets me on the bike every day. Yellow has taught me the true meaning of sacrifice. Yellow makes me suffer. Yellow is the reason I’m here.”
– Lance Armstrong

“Yellow is not an in-between color, you’re either all in or you’re not.”
– Mobolaji Dawodu

“Watch out where the Huskies go
And don’t you eat that yellow snow.”
– Frank Zappa

“Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.”
-Pablo Picasso

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How To Get Perfect Results With Adobe Lightroom & ACR’s Lens Blur

Colin Smith shows how to use the new Lens Blur in Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW, including refining the blur and adding bokeh.

00:00 Intro
00:15 How to apply Lens Blur in Lightroom and Camera RAW
00:50 Lens Blur Settings
01:16 Focal Range, change the focus distance
02:06 Visualize Depth
02:46 Changing Blur area
03:43 Refining the selection, manually fixing the blur area
07:03 Multiple blur planes. matching the background
07:46 Final Settings for the most realism
08:17 Setting the Bokeh
08:58 The Different types of Bokeh

View more from Colin Smith here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

33 Great Quotes On The Color Blue

Enjoy this collection of quotes on the color blue.

Which is your favorite? Have one to add? Leave a comment!

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
– Neil Armstrong

“Whenever I gaze up at the moon, I feel like I’m on a time machine. I am back to that precious pinpoint of time, standing on the foreboding – yet beautiful – Sea of Tranquility. I could see our shining blue planet Earth poised in the darkness of space.”
– Buzz Aldrin

“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience….. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
– Carl Sagan

“To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold – brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”
– Archibald MacLeish

“No water, no life. No blue, no green.”
– Sylvia Earle

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Lightroom & Adobe Camera RAW 16 New Features in Photoshop 2024

Adobe Camera RAW 16 is here. Colin Smith shows the new features in Lightroom & ACR for Photoshop 2024.

00:00 Intro
00:12 Where didi the crop tool go in Camera RAW?
00:46 Targeted color enhancement with Point Color
03:33 Adding background Blur to a portrait with Lens Blur
06:06 Refining the selection for Lens Blur
08:01 What is HDR and why does it matter?
09:31 set up HDR output

View more from Colin Smith here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

How To Create The Best Color To Black And White Conversion Previews

The fully saturated image

light on dark pieces of paper - a combination that can only be made by localizing different conversions

dark on light pieces of paper - a combination that can only be made by localizing different conversions

To find the best color to black-and-white solution an image contains, it’s important to explore all of your options. One technique will quickly show you more options than any other – Photoshop’s dual adjustment layers (a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer below a Channel Mixer adjustment layer).

To preview all possibilities dynamically, move the Hue slider all the way to the left and all the way to the right.

But wait, there’s more.

As you’re previewing the many options available to you, remember you can localize the effects with masks. You can go beyond what you see in one mix by combining any of the tones you see in all of the mixes.

Few people can remember all of the possible combinations. So, save multiple copies with different settings and compare them. There’s nothing like seeing many options, side-by-side, to confirm you’re committing to the best solution.

You can read about this technique in more detail here.

The two solutions above can only be achieved by converting separate areas of the image differently using masks.

The solutions below show the different global conversions which can be combined.

Note no dodging and burning was used to create these solutions. Dodging and burning can’t produce these extreme effects, but it can be used to further enhance them.

Also, note this technique is not useful for semi-neutral images; an image has to have significant saturation in at least one color to benefit from this technique.

 


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The Best Way To Convert Your Images From Color To B&W Using Photoshop

Full-color image

Global B&W conversion

B&W conversion locally optimized for foreground

The color transformation necessary to produce the results

 

With so much power available during Raw processing (with Lightroom or Camera Raw) when converting color to black-and-white, you’re right to ask, “Why use Photoshop?” It’s a question worth asking every time you make a black-and-white conversion. And there’s a simple answer – when you want to convert the same color in two separate areas of an image differently. (Note: this technique is not useful for semi-neutral images; an image has to have significant saturation in at least one color to benefit from this technique.)

Photoshop can localize black-and-white conversions with masks. Often, the masks you need to do this will be extremely simple. But, for the rare occasions when you need to make a more complex selection, Photoshops’s robust masking capabilities are there for you.

Here's how to do it.


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24 Great Quotes On The Color Brown

Enjoy this collection of quotes on the color brown.

Which is your favorite? Have one to add? Leave a comment!

“I cannot pretend to feel impartial about colors. I rejoice with the brilliant ones and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.”
- Winston Churchill

“Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance, and none can say why some fields will blossom while others lay brown beneath the August sun.”
- Kent Nerburn

"Brown is a sober and sedate colour, grave and solemn, but not dismal, and contributes to the expression of strength, stability, and solidity, — vigour, warmth, and rusticity, — and in minor degree to the serious, the sombre, and the sad; not with the painter only, but also with the rhetorician and poet, with whom, nevertheless, many of the broken colours are yet "airy nothings" and "without a name."
- George Field

“Nevertheless, this external sound turns into internally powerful sound. When properly used brown paint produces indescribable inner beauty, self-restraint.”
- Wassily Kandinsky

“A baton of light across the bracken redeemed the reputation of the color brown with fiery reds and yellows.”
- Ian McEwan

“The color brown, I realized, is anything but nondescript. It comes in as many hues as there are colors of earth, which is commonly presumed infinite.”
- Barbara Kingsolver

"Brown is neither one of the basic color perceptions nor a primary color used in color mixtures, but for human beings it is constantly present both in nature and in their everyday surroundings. It is the color of the earth itself — of rocks and sand, of the bark of trees, of the fur of animals. In that sense, at least, it could be called the basic color of everyday life."
- Kunio Fukuda

"Brown is the color of hearth and home — of dried herbs and stone-ground bread and freshly baked cookies. It represents all of the nurturing, life-sustaining, down-to-earth qualities of terra firma, the very shade of earth itself. Just as in the sturdy oak, brown represents roots, a steady, stable source of security, comfort, and normalcy. It is the color of fertile soil and plowed earth, buckskin and rawhide, weathered redwood, bison and mustang, frontier land — rugged and outdoorsy. It is pine cone and bracken, chipmunk and acorn, beaver and doe. Brown is considered a classic shade of solid substance."
- Leatrice Eiseman

“My skin is kind of sort of brownish pinkish yellowish white. My eyes are greyish blueish green, but I’m told they look orange in the night. My hair is reddish blondish brown, but it’s silver when it’s wet, and all the colors I am inside have not been invented yet.”
- Shel Silverstein


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10 Tips To Help You Master Layer Masks In Adobe Photoshop

“In this video, Julieanne demonstrates ten essential shortcuts for working with Layer Masks, including how to add, delete, invert, move, reposition, copy, target, disable, change the density, and add a non-destructive feather to soften the edges of a mask.”

Follow up with her fundamentals of working with layers.

View more of Julieanne’s videos.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.