OP Editor's Blog

Theroxor design blog has published a guide to Photoshop guides. It’s a list of online Photoshop tutorials for beginners—or so it claims. I think it’s a great place to learn all sorts of great Photoshop techniques, but maybe not on your first day with the software. If you have minimal editing experience, you might want to practice a little bit before diving into these tutorials head first. This guide is really a great place to learn how to do more than the most basic processes, making the most of the powerful program tool by tool and technique by technique. Topics include everything from layer masking to selection tools to color palettes, so it’s kind of like a one-stop resource you can go back to again and again.

theroxor

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It’s not that I think I know it all, but I do know a thing or two about photography and the digital workflow. That’s why it’s always a pleasant surprise when I come upon something so important, so simple, so powerful, and so previously unknown to me. That’s exactly the experience I had recently when I was reading the ASMP’s Strictly Business Blog and Peter Krogh linked to his work at the DPBestFlow web site in which he explains the process of a “validated transfer” when copying digital files from one disk to another. Utilizing a validated transfer serves several functions, most notably minimizing the opportunity to introduce corruption into image files and alerting you to potential problems with hard disks that could be prone to failure and data loss. I like that the validated transfer is a fairly simple and straightforward procedure; see for yourself by watching a video of the validated transfer in action at the dpBestflow web site.

asmp.org: strictly business/2010

dpbestflow.org

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The Epson International Pano Awards is the printer company's worldwide recognition of panoramic photography. The Pano Awards aims to showcase the work of panoramic photographers worldwide, with more than $13,000 awarded in cash and prizes. Best of all, anyone can enter. There are two sections—one for amateurs and one for pros or pro-caliber amateurs—with two categories in each, Nature and The Built Environment. To enter by April 30th, check out the details and submit online at theepanoawards.

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Rob Galbraith always points out great photo galleries online, and lately he’s been highlighting Olympic coverage from around the globe. With links to galleries on sites such as the Sacramento Bee, the Denver Post, the Toronto star, Germany’s Stern and many more, Rob has compiled a definitive look at the Olympic games through the eyes of the world’s photojournalists. My favorite portfolio is the panoramic work of Finnish photographer Kari Kuukka. While you can’t read much about Kuukka’s work (unless you read Finnish, that is) the photographs provide not only an immersive view of the Vancouver venues, but a behind the scenes glimpse of what covering the games was like for the multitude of photographers, videographers and journalists involved.

robgalbraith.com

docimages.fi: vancouver/panoramas

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Resolve, the Livebooks photo blog, has gone live with its IMPACT project—an interesting take on the online art gallery designed to promote the use of a blog as an exhibition space. It’s a pretty simple concept and an interesting approach that works well. Functioning much like an old school web ring, each gallery lives on a photographer’s own web site. What’s best about it, though, isn’t the way it’s set up—it’s the opportunity to view the work of world class travel, sports, landscape and wildlife photographers such as OP regular and master photographer Art Wolfe. I particularly enjoyed Rachel Wolfe’s portfolio of photographs from Jamaica, the island from which I’m writing this update, and Daniel Beltra’s beautiful yet ominous work on tropical deforestation.

blog.livebooks.com

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Are you longing to bring out the computer geek in your outdoor photography adventures? If so, Steve Berardi at Photo Naturalist has put together a list of five great computer geek tools for photographers. These include weather web sites offering tracking data for precipitation and pattern prediction, sun and moon-phase web sites that will detail where and when the sun will rise and set and what to expect from the moon for an evening or early a.m. landscape shot. It’s a great list. I’d also add to it a program that I think is super cool, The Photographer’s Ephemeris. This freeware program offers extensive information and even graphical topographic mapping of the sun and moon’s position in the landscape—even detailing the length of shadows cast at a certain place and time. It’s a neat way, as are the other five tools on Mr. Berardi’s list, to wield the power of the computer to help take great pictures—as opposed to just bringing it into the workflow after the exposure is made.

photonaturalist.net

stephentrainor.com

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Speaking of doing every possible thing you can to speed up your workflow… ActionRunner is a program that will "give you your life back." It's a simple drag and drop editing system that works with your favorite Photoshop actions to help automate every aspect of the image editing process. The more images you work with, the more important this sort of thing becomes. Built for Windows and Mac platforms, and compatible with every CS version of Photoshop, ActionRunner allows you to drag photos directly to visual icons representing the actions you’d like to apply. Rather than running immediately, though, the real key is the program’s ability to queue up multiple images and multiple actions to run, and then letting it go all at once. What a way to put the power of automation to work for you and further streamline your photo editing workflow.

actionrunner.com

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Ever wonder what effect JPEG compression has on your images? Check out these videos at PetaPixel to see exactly the ramifications of saving JPEG files over and over multiple times. The second video is more intriguing because the artifacts practically obliterate the entire image. The post’s commenters seem to be caught up with the idea that this shows just how damaging JPEG compression is and they use it as proof why you shouldn’t ever save JPEG files. I do work with RAW photos, but JPEGs have their place. While these videos sure show the danger of jpeg artifacts, they also prove the opposite point. How? Because to achieve these problems they saved the files hundreds of times, compressing and compressing and compressing over and over again. To really illustrate the typical life of an average jpeg, there are probably five or even ten saves at the most. To see that effect you’d have to stop after the first five or ten frames of these videos to get a real inkling of the damage that comes from saving your jpegs in real world applications. While there’s no doubt JPEGs aren’t perfect by design, and JPEG compression creates artifacts that do degrade the image, I don’t think photographers should be afraid to shoot JPEGs when they have the need. Whether that’s to conserve space, speed processing, or just because it’s how you like to do it. It’s okay to shoot JPEGs. And interesting as the video examples may be, remember they are extreme cases of compression. They illustrate the point very well that compression does have an effect on images, but you also won’t ruin them with a few saves—it takes hundreds to do that.

petapixel.com

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If you’re like me you’ll take every opportunity to speed up your time spent editing photos on the computer. Not skip it, mind you, just make it more efficient. In Photoshop there are lots of ways to do that—from automating and batch processing to the simple use of function keys and speedkey shortcuts to save the time of making mouse clicks on menu and palette options. It may not sound like much, but the ability to make rapid adjustments (including selections, cutting, copying, pasting, saving and much more) by clicking the keyboard rather than the mouse can change the whole tempo of a photo editing session. Smashing magazine must agree with me, because they’ve created a downloadable and printable PDF cheat sheet that outlines many of my favorite speedkey combinations, and many more that probably should be a part of my repertoire. Along with learning these shortcut keys I also advocate assigning function key combinations to your most frequently used Photoshop actions. Simply double-click the action to which you want to assign a function key, and choose the appropriate combination. Trust me: it feels very empowering to set in motion a handful of Photoshop processes with the simple click of a key. Efficiency never gets old.

smashingmagazine.com

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The unofficial Nikon blog recently linked to an awesome rock climbing video shot by Australian photographer Simon Carter on Nikon’s D3s D-SLR. And what a cool video it is. It's this kind of shooting that actually makes me very excited about the inclusion of HD video in still cameras. I want to see video footage like this—the things we don't usually see on video, in ways we don't usually see them. This experienced climber’s perspective captured in stills and motion is a great illustration of both the experience of rock climbing and the capabilities of using this new generation of hybrid cameras. The 2-minute clip feels like you’re right there on the mountain with Simon—especially if you watch the big and beautiful full-screen HD version. For more of that experience, head over to Simon’s web site to see more of his work and to watch a behind the scenes “making of” video.

nikonblog.net

onsight.com.au

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