All Posts, Photography, Photoshop
In April I attended the Photoshop World Expo here in Orlando, FL in April. There were so many people in attendance it was crazy. I ran into a few people I knew locally, but met a whole bunch more from all around the US. This was my first time ever attending a Photoshop World Expo, so I was like a kid in a candy store.
For those of you who have never attended the full expo, here’s what goes down. It is a few days of full day workshops led by some well-known industry leaders in photography and Photoshop. The last two days is the expo part, and that is where all the vendors are, real demos from experts, speakers, and even some hands on experiences from various software manufacturers.
Getting to see the vendors actually using some of the famed software like Photoshop CS6 or Perfect Photo Suite 7 was pretty cool. I ended up buying some software right on the spot convinced I’ll be able to replicate the effects they showed that day.
One of the apparent fan favorites is the free model shoot you can just walk up to and shoot with whatever camera you happen to bring with you that day. This theme was of a young blonde dressed in a nice aviator outfit accompanied with an aviation background. There were two constant light setups to both sides of her.
All Posts, Automotive, Cars, Photography
There was yet another car show here in Orlando a week ago. This was from the car enthusiast organization of Festival of Speed and personally I thank them for continuing this road show of high-class, high price cars from local owners and enthusiasts. I took advantage of a Living Social deal and packed my Nikon and got shooting. Below are some of the photos.
All Posts, Photography
If you’ve snapped a few pictures over any period of time, you’ll have no doubt snapped a few photos that truly captured the essence of the moment. When you do, you instantly know it, and it feels awesome. I think that’s where the term, “A Kodak moment” comes from.
Most of the shoots we do, we snap quite a few frames. Normally nothing less than 100 per hour. So you can imagine how many we need to review and select for post edit. But every once in a while we capture a look, or an innocent smile, or a strong sense of emotion that fully explain the moment whether the end viewer was there or not.
Below are some of those rare shots that we’d like to share with you from our camera roll. Of course, comments are always welcome!
All Posts, Photography, Product Reviews
We received an email from our friends at Wallpaper Wizard for a special deal on a new Mac OSX app called Photo+ from ArcSoft. If you do photography like we do, chances are you have quite a few applications that all do certain things very well. If on a Mac, you’re probably used to using the default Preview app. While great for single images, viewing multiple images in full, zooming, cropping, and such are a bit cumbersome and limited. With Photo+ however there are a host of great features to make showcasing a whole folder of images really easy and fast to display.
Using your track pad or Magic Mouse you can easily slide left and right or hover over images to view them. Full images within large folders open quickly. As you can see you have plenty of controls to use to:
- Easily start a slideshow
- Navigate images
- Delete images
- Share to social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr
- Make photos favorites
- Zoom
- And my favorite is entering full screen while still being able to scroll and navigate images
As you can see from this screenshot, you can easily crop out and copy to your clipboard, or save the image quickly.
Well take advantage of their Mac App Store introductory sale from $9.99 to .99Cents. Within a few seconds of purchasing it was downloaded and I was up and running with no fuss. Arcsoft does have some well documented tutorials should you need them, but looking at the icons they’re all pretty familiar if you already use most other photo editing programs.
All Posts, Photography, Product Reviews
Yes you heard me right, Adobe is offering a free copy of Lightroom 5. If you haven’t heard of or used Lightroom before, you should know it is an image editing software very similar to Photoshop – but not as hard to learn and use. The support for Lightroom 4 is awesome, there’s many tutorial videos posted by many photography enthusiasts like Kelby Training, Lynda.com, Adorama, and more.
Why is Adobe giving it away? Simple, it’s the easiest way to crowd-source for possible bugs, glitches, and feedback for enhancements before the product is fully launched.
What’s new in version 5? See what Adobe posted:
New Features in Lightroom 5 Beta
- Advanced Healing Brush – Easily remove objects and fix defects—even those with irregular shapes such as threads or lint—with a single brush stroke. Take precise control over what’s being removed as you make unwanted objects just disappear.
- Upright – Straighten tilted images with a single click. Upright analyzes images and detects skewed horizontal or vertical lines. You choose one of four correction methods, and Upright can even straighten images where the horizon is hidden.
- Radial Gradient – Lead your viewer’s eye through your images with more flexibility and control. The radial gradient tool lets you create off-center vignette effects, or multiple vignette areas within a single image.
- Offline editing with Smart Previews – Easily work with images without bringing your entire library with you. Just generate smaller stand-in files called Smart Previews. Make adjustments or metadata additions to Smart Previews and your changes will be automatically applied to the full-size originals later.
- Video slideshow sharing – Easily share your work in elegant video slide shows. Combine still images, video clips, and music in creative HD videos that can be viewed on almost any computer or device.
- Improved photo book creation – Create beautiful photo books from your images. Lightroom includes a variety of easy-to-use book templates, and now you can edit them to create a customized look. Upload your book for printing with just a few clicks.
Ok so enough of the fluff, go to Adobe and login with your username and download your copy. It will only be active to use until June so get cracking!
All Posts, Graphic Design, Photography, Photoshop
Before and After Edits
