A Photoshop Tutu

No,that Title isn't a misprint. You'll see why shortly.



Eat your hearts out, Photoshop Guys!

Wordless Wednesday

On a Tuesday... are we ready for the weekend yet?! :)

Finally got a chance to take a stab at processing these tonite. Meh.

Synchronized Spashing

Shot hand held and cleaned up (meaning color corrected, sharpened, straightened, and aligned by hand in Photoshop). Originally I uploaded this to Google+ where AutoAwesome did a GIF transformation. It didn't do a bad job of it, but I wasn't all that happy with it. If you want you can find it there as one of my postings. A better GIF could have been made if I had Photoshop CC or Camtasia... but I have neither. So I made this using ProShow Producer... my usual method. It was all worth a shot and the little amount of time spent just the same, and it was the first time I've tried anything AutoAwesome.

This was taken off the coast of the Big Island of Hawaii up near Hawe. The humpbacks migrate here each winter between about November and April and calve. Then they all head back up to Alaska for feeding. Each island in Hawaii sees some whales each year, but Maui and the Big Island probably the most. If you ever visit here this time of year a whale watching cruise is well worth the price.

How in the world could these guys pull this off if they weren't communicating somehow?! Stick your head underwater here anytime while they're here and you'll immediately know they're talking to each other all the time.

Dynamic Editing

BOGGIE - NOUVEAU PARFUM (official music video) from THE SOUP on Vimeo.

Now you try it.

Kinetic Typography

Conan O'Brien Kinetic Typography from Jacob Gilbreath on Vimeo.

I saw this tonite and loved it. Many of you not from the USA and not familiar with who Conan O'Brian is, or what he has done on USA television over the past 20+ yrs or so, may not know or understand the full story of what he's been thru. But in a way that doesn't matter because the message he had to share in this speech is more important. And beyond that the typography is wonderful. Those of you who may enjoy graphic design in various forms have that to wonder over as well. This is good stuff and a very creative way of reproducing a moment. I can think of other speeches where this would be effective as well. Maybe you can too.

Enjoy!

Pixelstick Light Painting

Have you ever tried light painting a photograph? Have you ever wanted to? If you have a few hundred bucks burning a hole in your 2013 Christmas gift budget a couple of enterprising Kickstarter guys have something that just might just take your photography, "I'd like to be able to do that", wish list to a whole new level.

Deadline for ordering now is Dec 13, 2013. Estimated delivery is May 2014. Every Kickstarter project is a risk, but I've been involved in five (5) so far and every one has delivered exactly what I expected. YMMV.

For more information be sure to visit the Kickstarter pixelstick - Light painting evolved webpage.

Content Aware Fill

If you don't know what content aware fill is this won't make a lot of sense to you. But if you do know what it is you'll probably be laughing about 10 seconds into this.

Harry Potter! Frodo! Where are you?! :)

Virtual Motion Graffiti

Incredible work by Daniel Silva.

Evangelists

Nowadays... that is to say, in the digital age, we have evangelists. No, I'm not waxing theological here, I'm referring to the software gurus (and gurugals) who seem to eat, breathe, live, and love the complex software packages we alternately love/hate. I have two evangeli; one I've met personally (and she's as sweet as she looks in her various and sundry videos), and one I'd like to meet some day.

Lynn Allen is my go-to AutoCAD evangelist. I've taken classes from her and met her in person at AU a few years ago.  I never miss Lynn's bi-weekly Cadalyst Video Tips either.  You can sign up if you like them and get email notices when ever a new one comes out.

Julieanne Kost is my Adobe evangelist. One look at her work and you have to believe she has plenty to share. Take your eyes off her blog for a while and you're sure to fall behind the curve.  Every day, Julieanne shares Instagram photos from her travels (and she travels a lot!).  Here she's compiled a year's worth of her favorites.

You've gotta love (and use!) the internet these days. And hitch your wagon to every "evangelist" you can find!

Adaptive Lens Corrections

Russell Brown is the Sr. Creative Director at Adobe Systems and a great innovator in the use of Photoshop. Until I discovered his new video above I wasn't even aware that Photoshop CS6 had the capability of adaptively correcting lens distortion. I frequently shoot various wide angle lenses and have long been a devotee of panoramas, but this will take future creations to an entirely new level.

Have a look at what Dr. Brown has done here, and if you have CS6 be sure and give the new Adaptive Wide Angle filter a try. This video is sure to help you learn how to process images with this amazing filter correctly!

Enjoy!

Export Settings in LR4

Here we go with another Lightroom 4 video.  Again, this is in response to a question I received recently about how to set up LR4 to save (Export) photos in a format other than TIFF.  This one was kind of fun to produce because I used my new headset/microphone setup for the first time... so you get to hear my "Charlie Chaplin" voice.  :)  But I also messed with ProShow Producer to add background music.

You learn, I learn.  That's how it works, so I hope this helps someone out there.  I know of at least one person who will find it useful.  By the way... this is not meant to be a definitive instructional on this aspect of LR4.  It's just how I do things.  What works for you is what matters.  With that being said,

Enjoy!

Spot Removal and LR4 Adjustments

A friend of mine asked me a couple of questions the other day about using the new version of Lightroom 4 (LR4), and since we're thousands of miles and many time zones apart I decided to help via the blog and YouTube. Hopefully some of this may help others too, so here goes!

There are two videos here... the first one talks about Spot Removal. The second talks about using the Adjustment Brush. Both use a couple of photos in the Lightroom library. The idea will be to clean up the spots first on a reference image and then use that to Sync a target. Then we'll continue on the target with brush adjustments.

Both videos are best viewed full screen at 720p HD.