PHOTO TRAVELER

My Go-To Gurus
With so much to learn about new technology, it’s helpful to have a troupe of experts on whom you can rely
By Bob Krist

It Is The East, And Julianne Is The Sun...
I discovered Julianne Kost just in time to save me from doing my own tragic Shakespearean balcony scene. When I first made the switch to digital years ago, I had trouble with many things, especially batch processing. I had done an instructional segment about fieldwork for Epson on their first Print Academy DVD, and it was on that disk that I came across Julianne’s segment about batch processing in Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw, of all things—just what I needed to know.

An Adobe evangelist, she made effortless and total sense of the whole process—it took me only two viewings of the lesson to get the hang of it, miracle of miracles, and I was on my way. Fortunately, for me, Julianne did more than the Epson video. She had a complete set of DVD instructional videos about CS2, which helped me to learn the ins and outs of that program. When CS3 was announced, I held off on upgrading until, you guessed it, Julianne Kost’s set of instructional DVDs was released!

The CS3 complete version comes on three DVDs with more than 23 hours of instruction. It’s broken down into chapters and indexed so you can dip into the lessons where you need them and not have to watch the whole thing—I was interested in the new features of Adobe Camera Raw in CS3 as well as the new Bridge; I didn’t spend much time on the hand-coloring tutorial. But the nice thing is, if I needed to do something like that in the future, the information is all there (www.software-cinema.com).

The Doctor Is In
While Julianne’s on-screen persona and voice is quiet and reassuring, another Adobe evangelist, Russell Brown, takes a completely different tack: that of an old-time medicine-show huckster! When Dr. Brown is in the house, he’ll cure what ails you in the Photoshop department. His delivery is upbeat and wacky, but his online tutorials are spot-on helpful, entertaining and free (www.russellbrown.com/tips_tech.html)!

Anybody who has to output a lot of JPEG or TIFF files from a RAW shoot appreciates the Image Processor automation in CS2 and CS3. But way back in CS, there was no built-in Image Processor. It was originally available only from Dr. Brown, as part of his free package of downloadable scripts called “Dr. Brown’s Services.” Adobe incorporated that Action into subsequent versions of Photoshop, but services like “Dr. Brown’s Place-a-Matic” (a script designed to place Smart Objects into CS3 documents) are still available only from him.

Most of the time, I use Dr. Brown’s 1-2-3 Process out of Adobe Bridge. This is just like Image Processor in the Script menu of Photoshop, but it offers more options for outputting your RAW conversions to JPEG, TIFF and PSD. For this script alone, I’d be eternally grateful to the good doctor. But his remedies have helped me in other ways, too.

Once, I was hired by Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation to photograph the then newly opened Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. This magnificent structure is topped by a huge atrium, and the shot they were looking for was of people milling about in the lobby during a concert intermission showing as much of the atrium as possible.

The problem was the weather and the timing. When the inside of the structure looked good, before the concert, there were enough people about, but the sky area was all white and burned out. By the intermission, it would be way past twilight, and the sky area would be featureless and pitch-black. There was no one frame that would show this place the way the client wanted to see it, and there was no way to do a straight double exposure with a long time between shots. I’d have to use multiple exposures shot very close to one another time-wise, but far different in exposure and white balance, blended after the fact, in Photoshop.

  « Previous Page  |  1  |  2  |  3  |  Next Page »