The calendar just turned its pages to 2015. We have tiny and versatile cameras like the GoPro Hero 4 filming 4K video, camera companies making 50-megapixels DSLRs, and artists making mind-blowing stop-motion/hyper-lapse/time-lapse films. So why is it still so hard for artists and big brands to easily connect to collaborate on photo and video projects?
Today marks a special day for the beloved Adobe Photoshop, as today is it's 25th birthday. Even at only 25 years old, Photoshop has had a number of facelifts. From it's initial release, Photoshop was revolutionary in it's tools, and still remains to be the best tool for photographers today. So lets take a look at all the changes this iconic software has seen over these last twenty five years.
Last summer Apple announced that they were discontinuing both Aperture and iPhoto and we are now seeing the replacement application. Apple Photos solves the modern problem of what to do with the hundreds or thousands of photos you take, often with many devices and over a long period of time.
Adobe has been king-of-the-hill when it comes to high-end photo editing for as long as I can remember. With the exception of programs like Gimp (I only know one working professional who uses this, for reasons beyond me) Photoshop is the undisputed industry standard. That may be a thing of the past if Affinity Photo has anything to say about it.
After endless hours wasted, I found the solution for an issue I've had using the Intous tablet with my Macbook Pro. The brush would get stuck and I couldn't hit Photoshop shortcuts between brush strokes. I went through the hassle of reinstalling all drivers, buying a new tablet and setting all my Photoshop settings back to default before finding the following simple 30-second fix. This issue pertains to people using Apple computers with Photoshop CS6 or CC and a Wacom Intous tablet. The fix is for the following issues:
Branching off from their web-based portfolio service, Format has launched a free iPad app named Kredo. The app allows users to add and organize their images into portfolios, exhibit portfolios to clients in a sleek-looking presentation, publish their work to the Kredo Discover network, or share their portfolios with anyone else on any device with optional password protection. While up against the trusty tactile printed portfolio and other digital portfolio services, the unique features and dark, minimalist layout may be something worth testing out.
Patrick Hall shared some opinions about what features our professional DSLRs absolutely should have, but don’t, going into 2015. And he was right. But as happy as having those features would make us, not one or even all of them would allow any single company to become the next Apple or Google of the photography world. However, there’s something bigger that no one is thinking about — or at least there aren’t any signs of it. Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Phase One, Hasselblad; no one seems to be doing what it would really take.
VSCO, Mastin Lab Presets, Florabella, and Pretty Presets. If you've looked for advice on retouching in the last few years, you've probably been recommended one of these preset and action systems at least once. They're designed to give you beautiful film simulation and color tones to make your images look great using a single click of the mouse - and I hate them all.
You read that right. It was rumoured late last year that Google was playing around with the Android camera API to include raw capability, and then we reported that this feature was rolled out with the latest 5.0 Lollipop update on many Android devices, but now we finally have an app that lets us access this feature and use it to our hearts content.
If you've been longing to make your photos a lot more interactive, there's a new app launching today that’s set to cure your itch. The mad scientists at Fyuse have come up with some incredibly cool spatial technology that blends photography and video to create a unique and interactive experience, all from your iOS or Android device.
For an app that brings the hipster out in everyone, Instagram showed it can really grow up today. Five new filter updates almost wouldn't matter. So what? We have a million other apps and editing tools and already sometimes too many Instagram filters. But today's update brings something that Instagram has lacked from Day One: subtlety.
At the Photo Plus Expo a couple months ago in New York, a new photo management software solution was introduced to much fanfare: Mylio. Mylio aims to solve a lot of problems that other companies seemed to be floundering around. It would give us complete access to our images no matter what platform we were on, and would regularly back them up across platforms and in the cloud or through whatever system you were currently working. It also brought something else to the table that immediately caught my interest: an in-house, custom built raw editor that worked on iPad, iPhone and desktop computers.
I feel like I'm constantly hearing about new shortcuts in Lightroom that make my workflow increasingly painless. This is one that's been around for a while, but you have probably never used it. This short video is an easy to follow tutorial from photographer Matt Kosklowski about an exposure feature that will surely speed up your editing process.
Ever since the first mention of the Lytro camera system, I have been intrigued by how exactly it works and what possibilities it opens for photographers wanting to have complete control over their image, right down to the depth. With Lytro's announcement of the new Focus Spread feature built into their new software you can now pick and choose, in post-production, which sections of a photo that will be in focus.
This week, Alien Skin announced version 7 of their wildly successful editing platform, Exposure. Along with a beautiful UI, several new film-stock emulations, new non-destructive tools (including a new straighten tool), new texture overlays (some of which were made by Lara Jade and Parker Pfister) and new file browsing interface, the most exciting addition to Exposure 7 is new comprehensive raw file support. Exposure 7 is available now for $149, existing Exposure 6 users can nab a copy as a free upgrade for people who purchased after June, 2014 or $69 for other Exposure 6 owners.
Through Premiumbeat.com's Vimeo channel and blog, motion graphic designer Kevin Gater did the world a huge favor by recently providing a tutorial on creating realistic, falling snow with RED Giant's After Effects plug-in. There are a ton of settings in After Effects, let alone in the RED Giant Trapcode Particular plug-in, that would take forever to navigate; but Gater does a great job going through which settings to ignore and which ones to pay attention to so you'll know exactly what to tweak for your needs. Thankfully, in 15 minutes, you can be ready to add great snow effects for the holiday season or that high-mountain horror short with just a few careful clicks.
As a relatively recent convert to Instagram, a former outsider-looking-in, there are a few things about the app that I don’t particularly care for or make use of. Like most people I know, I’m not at all tempted to make use of the built-in, over-cooked, HDR-gone-wrong filters. When I do post a photo taken on my phone, it’s been edited in VSCO Cam. I’m also not a huge fan of the user interface in Instagram. It’s a little clunky, oft overwhelming, and features a rather uninspiring design. For a better viewing, browsing, and exploring experience I’ve turned to a seemingly unknown app, Primary.
While photographers have been able to upload their RAW files to Google Drive for quite some time, apparently, we’re now one step closer to being able to process those in Photoshop directly through our browsers. An almost two year effort on the part of Adobe and Google has brought Chrome-based Photoshop to fruition. They’ve got a version called Photoshop Streaming that they’ve sent out to educational institutions to test out over the next six months.
I absolutely love seeing the photos I have taken hanging up in my client's house. However, I dread the time it takes to get together and try to sell large prints or canvases as I know I could be using the time for other things. Finally, I've found a solution that I am super excited about that will make the experience for both my clients and I enjoyable, quick and easy. The end result is a win-win for both of us. Swift Galleries is about to change everything!
I’ll never forget the email; I was on a plane somewhere over the Florida coast, on my way to the Bahamas for the Fstoppers Workshops 2014. Just before I left the States, I had signed on with the artist consulting firm Wonderful Machine. The first step in preparation for a press release was to tear my website apart. The critique was tough and they slashed it hard… here I am in one of the most beautiful places in the world, feeling a truck load of anxiety. For years, I had thought I had a clean and straight to the point website, but it turns out I needed to strip it down even more.
Go behind the scenes with one of the worlds top high-end retouchers, Pratik Naik, in this two part video as he walks us through his process of working with a model shot by David Geffin. Exploring the fine line between retoucher and photographer you can see his passion for what he does and the understanding it takes to capture the photographers vision perfectly.
The guys at VSCO - Visual Supply Company - are at it again. Today they released Pack 6 of their wildly succesful Lightroom/ACR/Photoshop-based film emulation presets. They've dubed the set the alternative process collection, which includes films that have been pushed, pulled, and cross-processed stocks.
Most people I work with manually dump thousands of files at the end of their shoot day (myself included.) A stack of cards, hard drives, and waiting for one card to finish before starting the next. All of this is followed by checking each dump to make sure nothing was missed. A new software app from Red Giant is looking to help this process, without bogging users down with extra steps.
Adobe has released a plugin it promised a while ago to migrate photo libraries from Apple's soon-to-be-forgotten Aperture and iPhoto apps into its own Lightroom. If you're worried about Apple's switch to its own all-in-one photo app, "Photos," or simply want to ensure similar functionality to that found in Aperture, Lightroom has long been an industry-standard alternative. There are, however, a few notes to keep in mind with regard to migrating from these apps to Lightroom.
A sign at the flea market read "Creative Minds are Seldom Tidy." Do you ever feel this way? Do you ever wish you had a program that would help you organize your thoughts, your to-do's, your contacts, contracts, invoices even bank information? As a creative, often we get so caught up in our work that we forget to run our business like a business. Fortunately a new program recently launched that will help you get everything organized and automated in your business making more time for you to actually do the things you love.
One of the big things lacking in my workflow was the ability to schedule Instagram posts. I have a personal Instagram as well as two work focused Instagram accounts and remembering to post on each one is time consuming and frustrating. About once a month I'll check to see if Hootsuite has added the ability to schedule instagram posts, but unfortunately it still does not. This month, my Google search led me to Latergramme and I was instantly smitten.
If you aren't using some sort of software to sync audio, you're sitting in your edit bay manually matching audio to video queues, be that sounds, video hints or timecodes. But what if you could just dump all your camera footage from an interview and all the audio from your recorder into one program and hit one button to sync them all quickly and accurately? You can with Red Giant Pluraleyes, and it's nearly perfect.
Last night we were treated to an annual event where Adobe encourages their developers to think differently and solve problems they perceive and present them to the world. This event takes place every year at Adobe MAX and is called "Sneaks." Sneaks has led to innovations like Content Aware Fill and Shake Reduction, but not everything revlealed at Sneaks is guaranteed to make it to a final consumer release. But what we saw looked pretty amazing.
Though it’s easy to think Adobe, being the giant company that they are, doesn’t pay attention to the opinions of the average layperson, it has been my experience that the opposite is true. At the very least, the developers and project managers at Adobe indeed read Fstoppers, so this is your chance to tell them: is their direction the right one for photographers and filmmakers?
