Chromasia Photoshop Tutorials

Looks like The Nightingale's (of Chromasia fame) new Photoshop tutorial is up. It's titled "LAB Color mode: part two" and can be found here. Since it's part two, you might also be interested in part one.

I haven't actually checked any of these out, but the sample, on Tonal Range and the Curves Tool looks very detailed and well done. I'll have to read in more detail later. Thoughts? Are they worth the money?

Everyone's favorite newsletter Photojojo has written an article that should clear up most of the questions about What the Hell is the Unsharp Mask?

Photoshop Express has added Flickr integration. It's adding features like this that will kill off those other up and coming online editors.

How to Create Photoshop Actions

Maybe You Need Some Photoshop Actions

Photoshop users who spend lots of time trying to get things just right, might be interested in some actions that do things right. I can't vouch for them since I haven't used them, but the examples look great, and perhaps your photos can too—with little to know post production work.

Photoshop Seminar Tour

The Photoshop Semiinar Tour is going on in late August in select eastern US cities. Check out their site for more details.

Though perhaps not the best organized site, Photoshop Support looks to have a ton of tutorials and useful stuff on, what else, Photoshop.

Out of Bounds

When I saw this technique, I was stumped thinking about where it could be used. This morning though, I was thinking about it a bit more and feel as though I've seen similar things on a few web sites as part of their layouts. So, perhaps this link isn't really photography related, except maybe the brief introduction the tutorial gives about layer masks in photoshop.

Philip McClure, has written an article comparing The Gimp to Photoshop.

Fauxto

Finding Fauxto this morning was a bit of a shock. I'm not one for this whole revolutionary phase where we put huge applications online and use them over the web, especially a real image editor like Photoshop or The Gimp. I'm also not a huge fan of things written in Flash, and Fauxto is that as well.

Though it's in it's beta form, the early release of Fauxto is pretty impressive. It looks and acts like a real image editor. It's definitely one of the most impressive Flash apps I've seen in recent history. Check it out. Also be sure to check out there blog.

The Non Beauty in Beauty Photography

The amount of post production in fashion photography kind of takes the "beauty" out of creating images with a lens and film/sensor. Fortunately for some, tools like Photoshop and techniques like this (photoshop tutorial on achieving smooth skin) help sell products and make it possible to save money on the costs of making the images used for advertisement campaigns.

Unfortunately for others, especially impressionable young women, the editing and post production sell the idea that we are not beautiful enough, and that we must live up to some unachievable standard.

This isn't to say that I'm not a fan of fashion photography, beauty photography and other forms of photographic expression (even the use of post production techniques). However, it is my feeling that the industry should play a bigger part in making sure that impressionable young women are aware of these techniques so that they stop doing stuff like this.

Though it doesn't solve the "runway model" problem, where models appear in uneditable forms (i.e. live action), fashion photographers have a great new way to take an already good looking model and make him/her look that much better. I'm all for post production in fashion photography because it has this amazing ability to sell products and keep models alive while doing it, but I'd really like to see more ad campaigns and fashion photography that promotes the natural beauty of people.

Blurbomat brings us a great tutorial about taking a non interestingly lit scene and making it look fantastic with photoshop.

Getting Rid of Tourist Pixels

Nothing worse than tourists in your tourism pictures. Or, if you live in a big city and would like to just go out and take pictures of it... Same thing goes. Not to worry anymore, How to Remove Tourists from Your Photos takes a look at getting rid of those pixels that muck up a perfectly good shot.

High Dynamic Range Tutorial

With Adobe's release of Photoshop CS2, many photographer's became interested in High Dynamic Range (HDR). HDR uses 32-bits per channel rather than the usual eight or sixteen bits. However, your camera doesn't just magically take HDR images. Instead you take a series of images and compose them together. What you get from all this are photos with a greater range of brightness values, to which you can edit til you have the holy grail, the perfect photograph. Read Earthbound Light's tutorial on HDR.

Get Rid of Haze with Photoshop

It's fun and easy to take photos out of airplanes, or from high above the ground. However, you normally end up with washed out and unsaturated photos. Michael A. Covington shares with us a way to Process Aerial Photographs with Photoshop.