TipSquirrel.com Photoshop Tutorials
Ever wonder how people create those cool “Infrared” Black & White images with ACR and Photoshop? Colortrails and TipSquirrel.com have teamed up to show you how easy and fun it can be to use this workflow. It’s next best thing to having an infrared sensor in your camera! -Dan
Adobe Digital Imaging How-Tos
Apologies for the prolonged absence from the web-o-sphere; this week I put the finishing touches on a new book (Peachpit, Adobe Press), called Adobe Digital Imaging How-Tos. It’s been quite a challenge but with the help of some talented editors and layout professionals, we made it!
Over the last three months I’ve been working hard to get nearly 300 pages worth of professional tips for Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3 and ACR 6.1 into published format, as well as taking time to get nearly 7 hours worth of video tutorials published. Needless to say the web site took a back seat for a while. 
The book will be out in August, just in time for the new school year, and I hope you will agree that it’s packed with a lot of good information, tips and shortcuts for getting the most out of your digital photos and imaging workflows.
Features like the new Noise Reduction controls, Lens Corrections, and (Film) Grain effect are covered as part of the raw side of the workflow. Once your’ve massaged your raw data and are ready for more retouching, you can jump into 50 tips on Photoshop CS5, including: Content-Aware Scale, Content-Aware Fill, Merge to HDR Pro, improved PhotoMerge, Puppet Warp and many more!
Check back in the weeks ahead for updates on more Adobe titles and free tips! I will be uploading free tutorials to my Vimeo account, as well as posting some free content that is part of the book, on Peachpit.com. Details will be forthcoming once those URLs are available. You can follow my daily updates for software and important tech happenings (as well as news beyond our mortal computers and software!) @Colortrails.
It’s been a busy spring and summer! Since March, I’ve been working to produce a new series of Adobe tutorials for macProVideo.com; two have been released so far, with a third title right around the corner! If you haven’t worked with macProVideo before, I recommend you head over there and take a quick look. Every tutorial has free sample videos so you can experience their powerful streaming and subscription system, as well as the ability to view tutorials on any device, including iPhone and iPad! There are some seriously talented trainers there, including authors of Apple’s famous courseware, Emmy winning audio professionals and more. It’s a great group of people, who are dedicated to bringing you some excellent training titles at a very reasonable price.
A few words about my new Adobe video tutorials:
Photoshop CS5: Image Retouching & Adjustment provides 4 hours of detailed techniques for getting the most from Photoshop CS5′s image adjustments and new photo editing features. Content-Aware tools, key image adjustments, retouching tips, creative effects… if it’s a core part of the Photoshop photo editing workflow, it’s in there!
Just released, Core Lightroom 3 training provides nearly 3 hours of focused instruction on the latest advancements, including core raw editing techniques. Learn how to get organized quickly and start making precise raw edits with the Tone Curve, HSL, Lens Corrections and more. Even get some pointers on working with Slideshows, Contact Sheets, and more!
Finally, Mastering Adobe Camera Raw 6 is right around the corner, providing 2 hours of detailed tips for getting the most out of your raw edits with this popular Photoshop “plugin”. As the summer continues we’ll be bringing you more announcements for great Adobe tutorials as well as other titles, so I hope you’ll keep an eye out! -Dan (@Colortrails)
If you missed it, Adobe has released updates for Camera Raw and Lightroom, bumping things to ACR 5.7 and Lightroom 2.7. Aside from support for additional camera types (including the Panasonic G10 and several medium format digital backs), the new versions provide new demosaic algorithms to improve compatibility with the new processing and tools in Lightroom 3 Beta 2. You can read more here.
Photoshop plugin maker OnOne Software has some pretty cool products in its arsenal, including advanced masking and background removal with Mask Pro, detail enlargement capabilities with Genuine Fractals and more. But one of the cooler things they offer is a selection of high quality presets for ACR and Lightroom users, which you can download for free. Presets allow you to quickly apply subtle color or tonal characteristics like sepia or soft focus, without having to jump into Photoshop. Having a good collection of presets beyond the ones that ship with Lightroom and or Photoshop can be a useful thing; it’s definitely worth taking a few minutes to download and install these freebies IMO.
Meantime, for those of you in the US, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you a happy and safe Thanksgiving. See you next week! -Dan
Adobe released Adobe Camera Raw version 5.6 today with one bug fix for PowerPC users on Mac and a bunch of new camera models supported including the Nikon D3s and Canon 7D. Several new digital backs from Leaf and especially Mamiya (medium format) are supported now as well so it’s worth installing IMO.
For those of you who don’t keep regular tabs on the version of Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) or Lightroom that you’re using… you should! A few weeks back Adobe announced the ACR 5.5 and Lightroom 2.5 update. The reason these types of updates are usually released together is that the color and tone processing algorithms inside ACR are the same ones that drive Lightroom. This ensures that regardless of which software you’re using to process your raw files, you’re going to get the same results if you use the same controls and settings. This also helps when starting a raw edit in one environment and then continuing later in another; you can basically pick up where you left off.
Typically ACR and Lightroom updates only contain support for new cameras (and perhaps a bug fix or two), rather than new features. This may not seem like a big deal to you except when you consider that if someone sends you a raw file from one of the newer cameras, your version of ACR or Lr might not support that file if you haven’t updated in a while. So check for updates every couple of months at least. It only takes a minute or two to download and install the updates, so it’s something I do several times a year and which I find -as a professional photographer- to be a worthwhile exercise.
Enjoy!
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