musings from the photographic memepool [the shallow end]

A continuing series, of glimpses of my Polaroid project as it gets uploaded.

I am over halfway now in the scanning and processing, thankfully Photoshop™ has a nice set of features allowing a level of automation that alleviates the drudgery of resizing and converting file formats.

I have had some interest in a open prac day using the labs at PIC to allow former attendees of my workshops. So now that the year is winding down I guess I better get off my backside and do something about it.

The idea:-
Open access to a Lab of Macs with Photoshop CS on them, access to a scanner, and a printer. I then drift around the room and help people when available.

Times/Costs:-
10:00am to 4:00pm, $50.00 per head, minimum of 6 attendees. Colour film processing [35mm and 120] $3 plus the Prac fee. Cash on the day.

Date
Saturday October 21 or Saturday October 28 2006.

E-mail me with your interest, I am prepared to accept Flickr contacts as well in this endeavour.

I will probably squeeze in one or two more workshops between now and December as well more info on my website.

Here's a nicley distilled list of tips to help take better photos. I've just used the headings, the whole article is over on MSN. Aimed manily at people who like to wander the world at large camera in hand.

• Lens hoods, Use them Always!
• Steady your camera, if you want sharp images do everything in your power to make them so.
• Get outside more often, seeing what is going on around you is a good thing, learning to read light is a lifelong craft.
• Get outside when others don't. Capitalise on dramatic lighting situations.
• Find an unusual viewpoint.
• Keep the composition and the background simple.
• Use selective focus carefully.
• Hurry up and wait."Fortune favours the prepared"
• Don't get caught with your camera down.
• Think about different ways of framing your subject, try them out.
• Texture, kind of self explanatory really.
• Mood, use it to your advantage.
• Meaningful juxtaposition, even though I hate that word juxtaposition, it is so true, and in the urban environment everywhere.
• Always bracket [in the beginning, once you understand the intricacies of exposure, this is a last resort, see hurry up and wait.]
• Padded camera bag, handy but not essential.
• Supplementary lenses, handy but learning to see with one lens first only improves your ability to see all the time.

I offer these tips to stem the "oh I'll fix it in photoshop" attitude that is becoming more and more prevalent these days.

On the Digital Photography School Blog in fact, in an article about using light to add impact to your photography.

I have just finished Gallery submission number 2 for 2007 [fingers crossed on this one]. Anyway for some reason I decided to really tweak my images for the gallery application, in a way that I hadn't for some time. Live Picture, a now dead piece of software, was my app of choice back in the day when I began digital photographic print making. It runs OK in Classic on my laptop, but screams in OS 8.1. After a bit of a fiddle on my laptop, I felt my time would be more productive if I used my old beige G3 running OS 8.1.

Ooooooo drool. I had forgotten about the speed and ease of use on this gorgeous app which coincidentally originally retailed for $3,000 Canadian upon it's release. When it came out it in the mid 90's, it could open 200 meg files as if they were txt files and on a power Mac with the then whopping great pile of 128 meg of ram. A brush stroke happened in real time, there was no destruction of pixels in the editing process, as it was NOT a pixel editing app magnification was limitless, and it just does things the way Photoshop will never be able to do.

So with 8 images to tweak and edit for the then due proposal over the weekend, away I went, feeling guilty for spending such little time trying to achieve an end result, all up I think I spent 3 hours with 8 images. Some minor masking and curve adjustments, working swiftly with my pen and tablet as if I was really drawing. Oh the joy of it all. It will be a sad day when my beige G3 finally dies, this application really made the process of image editing a real joy, encouraged time spent with images, allowed infinite undoes all retrievable at any stage of the process. The editing is done in 16 bits internally and no pixels are harmed in the process. The edited files fit on a floppy disk, can be built out to suit the web or a billboard, and at at no point is the app getting in your face, it just edits.

Graceful, elegant, simple.

Photoshop CS 3 is now available in beta!

More learning is just around the corner, so I can keep my photoshop workshops current.

As I ran a workshop in Photoshop over the weekend I didn't get much of a chance to have a play with Photoshop CS3. One thing though I learnt was that my ability to convert my raw files using Photoshop 7 has been removed! When I delete the beta version hopefully this will correct itself? Another thing I learnt is that you can only use a CS2 license not a CS license number to activate the full functionality of the beta software.

Why am I NOT surprised? Of course Photoshop are determined to sell you the latest, fair enough too I guess, they are a company they need to continue to make money. What worries me though is the must have the latest and greatest mentality that exists in these kinds of things.

Everything I do in photoshop revolves around curves, levels, adjustment layers and layer masks, all features that have been available since version 5. Sure 16 bit editing* has come in since then, sure, the History Palette has also been implemented since then, and sure the Lens Correction filter has been an added bonus as well, do I NEED any of these features, no. Well the 16 bit editing is a bit of a must but as for the rest, whatever. But hey I open an image I crop, I adjust levels, I burn and dodge a little I emphasise colour slightly, I sharpen, all of this is gone globally and or locally on an image, do I need any of the other guff no, but more importantly do my students?

What my students need is to be able understand what constitutes good exposure either digital or analogue, what constitutes good lighting, and good composition, the rest is simply workflow and can almost be automated, on a global image level anyway.

So, do I need photoshop CS2 or 3? No! Would I appreciate it if as an educator I was given a real opportunity to find the strengths and weaknesses of an application by trying it out properly, so I can then share this knowledge with my students. Abso-fucking-lutely. Is this ever going to happen, I severely doubt it.

I want my students to understand first principles, I want my students to understand the idea of finding a workaround, I want my students to be creative and critical thinkers, so sorry Adobe, I'm off to find a creative solution to the problem of modern day digital photography editing and I beginning to doubt that Photoshop CS3 is part of that solution.

There is apparently a legal workaround with older versions of Photoshop to extend the beta's life, I am still waiting however to hear back from Adobe for the answer. I guess it's to be expected given the Christmas period and all?

So now I ring the help line and get put through to tech help. Tech help claim that it is not possible to extend the life of the licence beta with an older license number, and could I send them the file in question where I read that this could be done.

This is spiralling out of control

I have to find the file and send it back to them!

What ever happened to customer service? The shear fact I was told NO you must have a CS2 licence to do this blew me away! Keep going Adobe, you app is looking less and less likely to be the application of choice taught in MY college

Well I guess for a change*, I have egg on my face, I can't find the read-me file that I could have sworn allowed you to use an older Photoshop Licence to extend the beta of the Photoshop CS3. It seems I was wrong. I cannot find the file in question and the only read-me that comes close only talks about upgrading to CS2, ah well. Looks like Photoshop might be going to take a step back in our program at PIC? There are alternatives.

I've also e-mailed the support team at Photoshop to express my concerns over this issue. Part of me wants to think that they will take notice, but another is more realistic.

Here is a copy of the e-mail I sent:-

Hi I am an educator/artist/photographer, I teach photography and photoshop, to post secondary students, over 100 students a year in fact. Photoshop has been the main photo editing tool taught in our college for many years.

Needless to say I was excited to be given an opportunity to trial the beta version of CS3.

However, my disappointment sank to great depths, after speaking to Technical help today and was told that older Photoshop licence numbers can NOT be used to extend the 2 day trial period of CS3.

Given that I am unable to reasonably evaluate the software, I will no longer be in a position to advise as to it's suitability for my students. The outlay for my college is very high and I am not prepared to pay for a product that MAY not suit our needs.

I will be advising ALL my future students to seek out and find alternatives to Photoshop, and personally will investigate options open to myself and my students for cheaper smaller and faster applications to use to edit their photographs.

Yours Sincerely

Stuart Murdoch

*For those of you who know me this is a joke.

Here's the final word on the issue of Photoshop and their money grubbing attitude, at least they responded very quickly, pity about the grammar and spelling.

Dear Sir,
Thankyou for your email.

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/pdfs/200612/121406Photoshop.pdf

Above is a link that has information about Photoshop CS3 Beta Version.

I certainly understand your frustration about not being able to fully use the Trial.

Though it is a trial version and only last for 2 days, it might be possible to download the trial onto another computer, I hope this may be helpful?

Adobe Customer pride themselves on being good at what they do, and giving 100% commitment in all they do.

We of course are binded by rules , that for example apply to trial versions being available for a certain period of time.

I hope this is of some assistance.

Warmest Regards and Season's greetings are sent to you!

Paul.

Not too much to say really, hardly surprising after 2 days of talking about photoshop.

This scene at the end of our street is one I've had my eye on for a while, very happy with this shot, the sense of pace and light combined with the weird combination of the play equipment and industry speak volumes to me about modern suburban living, in Australia anyway.

I'm also really enjoying ShoZu at the moment an application that allows direct uploads to flickr straight from my mobile phone, best of all it's free.

Is slowly resuming. While the prints for my solo show lay here in my study all rolled up, ready to hang, I figured I'd share some tips on photoshop. This process is remarkably similar to a wet darkroom context, fwiw.

What all this really means is another of my photoshop workshops, is on the horizon.

Here is the original 16 bit scan, unadjusted. [I prefer to adjust post scanning, not that Silverfast isn't a good scanning package, I just prefer to work at home, whereas the scanner is at work.]

This is obviously nowhere near the original photograph, in terms of colour, density, and contrast.

The first thing then is, adjust the available data to see what the image looks like. A small aside here, if I may, I will be editing in 16 bits to minimise loss of data throughout the process, as Photoshop is a pixel editing application, and it destroys pixels in the process of editing, I'm told in part because of something called a rounding error.

Anyway my first move is to examine then if needed, adjust the levels on the image.

A note here, I always adjust each channel individually, the red, the green, and the blue. I adjust by pulling the black sliders inwards and the white slider inwards, if there are gaps.

no gaps here?

no gaps here?

no gaps here?

Interestingly enough, these histograms confirm the poor exposure I would expect from a camera such as a Holga. What to do then, as normally I would drag in these sliders hit OK and move on to the next part of the workflow.

Adjustment layers to the rescue.

By adding an adjustment layer to the mix I can now, non-destructively make modifications to my image.

In this instance I have used curves, to darken the image, particularly in the middle values.

All good and dandy, but it's got a ways to go yet. I can now see the image and start to think about how I want it to be perceived.

The image still seems a little cool?

Again I'l use an adjustment layer, this time colour balance.

The colours are cool, generally speaking, but I can tell without using the info palette and the eye dropper tool, this is a Cyan colour cast mainly in the mid-tones and highlights. A quick application of these adjustments and it's now starting to resemble a more realistic interpretation of the scene.

Note I'm not going to even begin to talk colour and it's emotional impact to this image.

Not only am I going to use an Adjustment Layer, but also, I am going to paint on that mask to reveal and hide at a local level the colours I want to emphasise.

The last stage of the basic adjustments.

Personally I want a little more punch to this image to add some more grunge to an overall post-punk kind of scene, so my last adjustment layer will be a curves layer and this time I'll simply pull the shadows in and the the highlights across by about one square, on a 10 square dialog, and bang the image is now ready for some serious contemplation and tweaking.

Technorati Tags: photography, photoshop, negative, colour correction, solo show

As I am on term break from one of the schools I work at, things may hot up here for a while. My solo show, at Trocadero comes down on the 7th, so if you haven't had a chance to see it, check it out, the prints are something to be seen, even I was impressed when they finally hit the wall. The next body of work is forming well, and I've a couple of small projects in mind in the interim. But other than catching up on some shooting and film processing things are otherwise quiet. Also I recently found an awesome location and plan on shooting out there over the next week or two.

Meanwhile here's an interesting article written by, Wayne J. Cosshall, it rather succinctly sums up an aspect of what photography both digital and analogue is really about, for me anyways. Lets' see what the crew in the Melbourne Flickr pool have to say about it?

My online experiment in photo publishing is trundling along well, after a couple of hiccups a week or so ago. Occasionally, I have a little trouble choosing images, which is part of the experiment, and usually more driven by me simply commuting to and from work and not really being attuned to my surrounds and the light notice anything worth capturing, and therefore not having enough images to choose from despite me upgrading to a 512 mg card for the phone camera.

While we are on photo-blogging. I am trying to locate a photographer, who, used to post to Usenet, low rez b&w on a regular basis. I've had a bit of a dig around using 'Unison' [a neato little app if I may say so] and have had no luck in there, [given the wild west nature of Usenet, I need to be careful where I look], so if either of my readers remembers this person can they send me the name of the group they posted too?

I have 2 friends who are who will be in a position to use the interwebs for news from distant places, looking forward to what Thomask sends back from his trip OS, and what Gayle and I manages to upload, Thomask will be in a highly technologically advanced culture,[so I'm lead to believe] and Gayle and I will be in a place where the internet is scarce and expensive [I think?].

Technorati Tags: geek, location, phonecam, photography, photoshop, solo show, trocadero

Soft Laboratory have produced a Raw Processing tool that I am about to download and trial, stay tuned for the results.

This paragraph in this Month's Mac world was what caught my eye.

“The range of control is phenomenal. A piece of software with this level of command is welcome and will suit the ultra-fastidious image worker The GUI is attractively and professionally executed.”

I am constantly on the look out for ways to subvert the use of Photoshop, this looks like it maybe another tool in the arsenal of image processing work-flows that hopefully will give Photoshop a run for it's money.

Technorati Tags: software, photoshop, tools, colour correction, geek, art, processing, raw, photographic, photography

After installing the software and opening a raw file from my hard-drive.

Technorati Tags: colour correction, computers, geek, photographic, photography, photoshop, raw