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F12Short and sweet is the theme for today. This shortcut will get you back to whence you came in a fast and easy way. Pressing F12 on your function key area of the keypad (both Mac and PC) will revert the image you have been working on to its original state. Another good shortcut to get you out of a mess. Why not try it?  Courtesy Apple At last. After much speculation the latest version of Aperture has arrived – during our absence in Canada – and the new baby is looking good. The new features Apple has added appear to address most, although not all, of the main feature requests from users of Aperture 2, including greater local editing and the use of the 64 bit goodness incorporated in Snow Leopard. The addition of Faces and Places was expected, given their presence in iPhoto for some time. For many users these options will add some really useful ways of accessing their database of images. Elsewhere, Brushes is targeted at helping photographers take their editing to the next level within Aperture by providing an intelligent, non-destructive environment for local editing that will heavily reduce the need to leave Aperture for other image editing software. Altogether, there are some 200 plus reported improvements in some 16 categories from UI changes to data organisation. Many of these changes are under-the-hood modifications focussed on speeding up the archiving and retrieval processing as well as quickly getting your images to the editing point you want. I can’t wait to try all the new features and will report back on the testing and give our rating of Aperture 3 shortly. Some reports are already filtering through of some users’ real world experiences. While many seem to have no issues there are many reports of major memory leak issues, leading some computer systems to be reduced to a crawl. This is an issue that really should not have made it through beta testing. Other reported issues include some with Airport Extreme and Time Capsule base stations, adjusting file sizes on email export and the upgrade process itself when the software may unexpectedly quit. Apple has already posted a work around for the last problem at http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3231. Working with your layers and want to quickly change the order of the layers without clicking and dragging? Here’s how to send a selected layer 1 place down the stack press : – Command + [ (Mac) Ctrl + [ (PC)To bring a selected layer 1 place up the stack press: - Command + ] (Mac) Ctrl + ] (PC)Why not try it? Today the humble Option (Mac)/Alt (PC) key comes to your rescue when in dire need within Photoshop CS4. Have you ever played with all the sliders and options in a menu box and wished you could extricate yourself quickly from the mess you have just generated? Happily there is just such a solution, and you don’t need to leave the box either. When you are in a menu panel which has a Cancel button, pressing the Opt/Alt key changes the Cancel button to a Reset button. This is immensely useful if you want to quickly reset things to what they were before you changed anything in the options box. Why not try it? The latest rumour doing the rounds about Aperture 3 is probably the most interesting and positive, since the October 2009 flurry in the Apple blogger doocot . A Dutch site suggests that a book on the said next version of Apples pro-photography package will be available in mid-February. The well known Apple blog, www.tuaw.com, has listed a post from Dutch website www.onemorething.nl. This suggests that the book will be available in mid-Feb. Great excitement mounts as we wait to see if the software will be announced during the upcoming Apple event on the 27th Jan 2010 in San Francisco. After a two year wait for an upgraded Aperture, we are expecting something extraordinary. The main focus of the event is likely to be the launch of the heavily rumoured new iTablet. It it bears any resemblence to all the hype this would be an excellent platform for displaying images. With Snow Leopard’s 64 bit goodness waiting under the hood to show its full prowess an updated Aperture would be an ideal application to demonstrate all that latent power. We are salivating already. Bring on the 27th.  Courtesy Sony Once more into the breach dear friends. Sony has announced an enlargement to its portfolio of DSLRs with yet another mid to low price point camera in the quickly burgeoning Alpha product line. The 450 offers some 500 series features with a well endowed 14.2 megapixel (effective) CMOS sensor, up to 7fps continuous shooting and a stunning battery life, producing up to 1000 images from one charge. Throw in HDR processing in-camera with an advanced Bionz processing engine and we have yet another excellent Sony product. The auto HDR brings cameras that little bit closer to the dynamic range of the human eye by combining two shots with different exposures. This feature can accept images with a difference of up to 3 EV. Sony has addressed the issue of sensor noise with a user selectable ISO range of 200 – 12,800. Whether this entire range will be usable is a significant test issue. The quoted ISO range will depend upon the application of noise reduction in three basic steps at the sensor. At one level the sensor is designed to reduce noise on a photocell by photocell basis. This is followed by a two stage application of noise reduction, before and after the analog to digital conversion. Sony claim that users will be able to shoot handheld shots by candle light. Testers will no doubt be trying to do just that. Like all other Sony Alpha cameras from the very first model, the Alpha 100, this latest DSLR incorporates its Steady Shot in camera stabilisation system that is claimed allows up to 4 stops of shutter speed improvement when hand held. The camera accepts Sony memory stick formats Pro Duo and Pro-HD Duo, as well as SD and SDHC format cards. With Live View this camera has brought many great features into an entry level camera. Pricing is still a moot point but Sony has long adopted a price conscious approach to the Alpha range in light of the great range of competitors aiming for the same price environment.  Courtesy Adobe Adobe has just released a free iPhone app, the snappily entitled Photoshop.com Mobile, which, as the name suggests, is tightly integrated with Photoshop.com. The app has a limited range of editing options that include Cropping, Rotating, Flipping, Exposure, Saturation, Tint, Black and White and Sketch, Soft Focus and a small range of Filtering options. It prompts you to select a pre-existing image or to take a new one. It also allows you to Save and Upload your images to Photoshop.com, where a free 2GB of online storage is available. Unfortunately, the Upload function on the edit menu is a bit flakey however, the dedicated Upload button on the main menu page worked perfectly well. The editing options, while limited in range, do what they do very well, although filtering is a bit of a mixed bag. All the editing functions are very well presented and allow you to work easily by dragging on the image. The Save function saves an edited JPEG version of the image back to your camera roll by adding it to the end of the existing images and incrementing the last image number by 1. Although based in the UK, I was able to register for this US optimised site with a small bit of toing and froing. Fairly quickly, I was able to upload any images on my iPhone camera roll to the Photoshop.com site – on which a number of additional edits are possible. The app also allows you to check what you have online at Photoshop.com and all in all is a great – and free – addition to iPhone photographic functionality. It gets a well deserved 4 stars from us. As we quickly approach the end of 2009 there is still no sight of anything from Apple relating to Aperture 3. This, and the fact that Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta is already out there in the wild and being tested by the same community targeted by Apple suggests either that Apple is preparing a huge advance in its DAM software or it is preparing to let it sink slowly beneath the waves. Evidence supporting the first option is limited. The advent of Snow Leopard suggested that the benefits of the underlying 64 bit architecture improvements alone could improve the performance of Aperture significantly on suitable machines. The arguments in favour of Aperture being left to wither on the vine includes the lack of a faster response to new DSLR camera models coming out suggests that Apple is losing some interest in keeping all its pro photographer users happy. There is little to no Aperture feedback from Apple in any forum and some Aperture forums have simply disappeared from view. In short, we are in a black hole about Aperture 3. I am not about to jump ship to Lightroom yet but am having a look at what Lightroom version 3 beta offers. I suspect that if Apple does not provide some positive information about Aperture 3, in lieu of the production of an actual new version, within the next 3 months their market share may drop to 3% of total market share and possibly 6% of the mac only market share. Aperture however still remains a tremendous application that facilitates roundtrips into and out of Photoshop. It happily manages all my image resources and provides a secure backup process for peace of mind. Its wonderful non-destructive processing gives me freedom to experiment in complete safety. Now, if it could be a lot speedier, have more local correction options, gradient filter etc. In this category we will be publishing sets of free actions for your personal use. Today the actions relate to the articles on the Rule of Thirds and the Golden Ratio. They overlay guides on your image showing either the location of the Rule of Thirds key lines or the Golden Ratio lines. Firstly a small tutorial about Actions in Photoshop.Actions are simply a collection of steps or actions that are recorded inside Photoshop. This could be almost anything you can do in Photoshop and can range from a few steps to the most complex processing within Photoshop. They are particularly useful when you need to repeat actions at regular intervals. In those cases they can save you immense amounts of time and effort. Photoshop ships with a large number of pre-recorded actions – some of which are well hidden. When you first open the Actions panel you will find a sample of Adobe actions installed for you. Often people look no further but there is a treasure trove of actions just a small step away. These allow a wide range of actions, including generating text effects, commands and even making frames for your images. To access all this goodness simply click on the toolbox menu at the top right hand corner of the Actions panel. The library of actions are nested near the bottom of the menu that opens. Why not try them? In today’s post we provide a couple of simple actions to overlay some guides on your images. These are based on either the Rule of Thirds or the Golden Ratio to help you to accurately locate the key parts of the image to produce a, hopefully, harmonious effect. To use today’s actions you need to: - 1: Download the action file 2: Insert it into Photoshop 3: Run the actions I will go through each step in turn. 1: Down load the action file Simply click on the URL below to download a zip file of the Actions. Unzip on receipt. 2: Insert it into Photoshop Double click the improved Images.atn file. If closed, Photoshop will automatically open and insert the actions for you. If Photoshop is open it will automatically insert the actions. 3: Run the Actions Open the Actions panel by going to Window>Actions or Opt+F9. Scroll down to the Improved Images section. Twirl the triangle open and select either of the two options Press the ‘Run’ button at the base of the Actions panel and hey presto. NB These actions remove any guides that may already be open. To remove the guides – go to View>Clear Guides Photography is full of so-called ‘Rules’, most of which can be characterised as aide memoires rather than do-or-die rules. Nevertheless they can help to remind us of better options or guide us as to the right settings to adopt. One ‘Rule’ that falls into the latter category is the ‘Sunny 16 Rule’. As the name suggests this is designed to help select appropriate exposure settings on a sunny day – not we see that many in the West of Scotland To cut a short story short the rule states that: - On a sunny day, with an aperture of f/16, use a shutter speed of 1/ISOIn other words, set the shutter speed to 1/200 with an aperture of 200, You can also extrapolate these settings for more or less sunny days. |
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