Two Freebies from O'Reilly

O'Reilly Media, a publisher of technical books and, more recently, titles on photography, has two free offerings. One is a webcast on Thursday, June 26, 2008, with photographer Rick Sammon, who will discuss "10 Key Ingredients for Cookin' Digital Photographs." Pre-registration is necessary and space is limited.

The other is a video podcast - 101 Photoshop Tips in 5 Minutes - by Deke McClelland, who does a fast-paced short music video that literally is about Photoshop tips. Some people will do almost anything as marketing. The link is supposed to be here, but when I tried, I got an error message that the site was "unable to forward this request at this time." Maybe their server was taking five after sweatin' to the oldies...

UPDATE: Here's a link that works.

An Anti-Photoshopping Rant

The San Francisco Chronicle ran an opinion piece that has become something you can expect periodically: a rant against "Photoshopping."

I get tired of the sentimental and wistful attitudes people have toward what they think is photographic purity. Certain, the drive for visual perfection gets a bit silly, but why blame Photoshop? In the past, people used airbrushing, scraping, paintbrushes, dyes, and pencils to "fix" images.

Do I heavily use Photoshop in my work? Absolutely - because if I'm doing something digitally, that is the way I crop, balance color, adjust contrast levels, spot dust motes, create unsharp masks, and a number of other niggling issues that were formerly considered responsible darkroom work. Do you really want that photo to look literally off-color, badly composed, and speckled?

When people "rework ... every shot," is this total transformation, or the normal twiddling that an art department or photographer must do? Are critics so lacking in technical understanding that they have no idea just how limited and misleading camera technology is? Guess what, folks: no photograph is actually what the photographer saw. Why not eliminate the distortions of lenses and limited color palates of both digital capture chips and film? Why not upbraid writers for even worse transgressions: bending quotes, hyping tension, enhancing drama, and otherwise recreating what they actually saw? What bigger fantasy-making machinery is there?

Retouching Rebound

For years magazines have been using retouching methods - now Photoshop, but once using inks, dyes, brushes, and razor blades - to remake the physical appearance of people. One of the top jobs has been to make models and actresses look skinnier. Now things are on the rebound, and the directive is to make sure that no one looks too skinny, according to the Telegraph in the U.K.

Adobe Doesn't Want Money for Photoshop Express, Just Your Photos

ArsTechnica reports that Adobe's licensing agreement for using the free online version of Photoshop gives it unlimited rights to make money off photos you upload to the site.

I've seen this sort of problem in the past, and have even reported on it - in Newsweek.com, if I'm remembering correctly (the subject at that time was MSN). The problem is that many companies don't seem to read through their agreements and understand the implications. Some amount of broad wording may be necessary to cover all the things that are effectively done on the web, but, really folks, would a little final read through the copy be that tough?

Supposedly Adobe will modify the agreement, but I'd suggest holding off using Photoshop Express until you see wording you can live with.

Review: Photoshop CS3 Photographer's Handbook: An Easy Workflow

I seem to be on the Rocky Nook mailing list. I just got a copy of Photoshop CS3 Photographer's Handbook: An Easy Workflow. If you've been using Photoshop for years, this probably has little interest for you. But if you've decided to take the plunge, this is a good first book. Notice my emphasis. You won't learn all the mysteries of the software available in the index. Certainly I noticed a few techniques in here that aren't, to my mind, the best ways of accomplishing a goal.

But what the book does is offer a roadmap, from bringing images in to learning the basic tools and retouching, and preparing images for their final use, whether print or electronic. The book (lists for $35.95) is only a couple of hundred or so pages long, but that's a strength in this case. You get at least one way of getting images through Photoshop. After you're comfortable with it, then there are many other references and more tricks than you could learn in a month of Sundays. This gives you a basic workflow that you can adapt and change to meet your own preferences and to incorporate the new things that you learn. But might as well get walking before you break into a sprint.

Book Review: 40 Digital Photo Retouching Techniques with Photoshop Elements

I had received a review copy of 40 Digital Photo Retouching Techniques with Photoshop Elements (published by Young Jin) from the US distributor, O'Reilly Media. It's thin as such guides go - 208 pages - but if you haven't yet gone beyond taking a digital picture into actually manipulating images, this a good introduction.

It's based around Photoshop Elements - a "lite" version of Photoshop that I've mentioned before - and even comes with a trial version on an accompanying CD. This isn't a comprehensive title on the subject of digital retouching; you can literally read a number of books on the subject and still not know everything about it. But as a way of getting your feet wet, it's solid.

Instead of learning one general technique after another, the book guides you through, as the title says, 40 different things you might want to do, incorporating what you need to know for each one. It's actually not all retouching in the classic sense of fixing a visual problem, though there is plenty of that. You start with learning how to correct contrast, move into gaining control over the colors in a photo, then get to a chapter called Enhancing Portraits, with some tricks I haven't seen before, like adding eye shadow to the image of a woman who wasn't wearing makeup. The book finally moves into general editing, adding special effects, and even such topics as adding motion blur and making greeting cards and web banners.

Of course, you can't expect to have all the information you would get in a larger volume. For example, they show one technique for creating high contrast black and white images from color ones, but there are at least three ways I can think of to also create black and white results, but with even more control. However, for someone new to photo manipulation - or someone, like me, who knows a fair amount but is always looking for new things to learn - this is a good book, particularly at a U.S. list price of $16.99.

Poor (or Cheap) Person's Image Editing

Photoshop is an amazing tool - and it's also an expensive one. I've often been asked what cheaper alternatives there are. Here are a few you might consider:

• Photoshop Elements This is technically the "lite" version of Photoshop, but don't let that fool you. Most anything you're likely to be doing in regular image editing is possible in Photoshop Elements, and Adobe often puts the newest features into this program before rolling them out in the flagship version. By itself it runs about $100 - not cheap, per se, but a bargain when compared to the multiple times more expensive Photoshop CS3.


• ACDSee ACD Systems (hence the name) has some great photo-related tools. The photo manager, whether regular (about $40) or pro version ($130), has basic editing tools built-in. You won't be able to retouch images the way you could with either of the Photoshop products, but you can crop, change size, adjust lighting levels, remove red eye, and do other tasks that might be all you need. Plus, you get a great image organizer. (Photoshop Elements also has image management, though personally I prefer ACDSee Pro).


• GIMP Feeling really broke? (Or really cheap?) GIMP is an open source application that doesn't cost anything if you download it. You won't get all of Photoshop's features. What you will get is quite a bit, though, and you can't beat the price. If you like a bit of hand holding (its lack being the one downfall of open source), then you should consider a book. GIMP 2 for Photographers includes GIMP 2 on a CD and will walk you through the installation and configuration before showing how to use the software. It's $30 list, but the Amazon link I provided shows it at just under $20.


• GIMPShop A writing colleague pointed this one out - a version of GIMP designed to work like Photoshop.