We don’t need no vanishing points
For this year's Sport Relief, seven celebrities will be cycling from John O'Groats to Land's End. This is a Worthy Thing, and good for them. The advert made me laugh, though:
To be fair, there are areas just north of Manchester which exist outside of Euclidean space, so it might be fine. Otherwise, the perspective seems...missing. Which might be ok - you could argue it's a particular style, and I've seen worse Photoshop jobs - but then you notice David Walliams' head. And arms. And hands.
Stop worrying and enjoy your wife
Design mockup for the Atheist Bust Campaign:
Update: some slightly-more-serious-than-anticipated discussion here.
Red rag. Bull.
In Friday's photoshop class we were tasked with manipulating a supplied image in 'ethical' and 'unethical' ways. We were then given a picture of the Pope.
There wasn't time for anything unethical.
Erik Johansson’s photoshop skills
Erik Johansson's reality/photoshop mashups transcend impressive into annoyingly good and finally depressingly so. Worth a look. The spilt coffee is my favourite.
Lost in Shibboleth
University finished early a couple of weeks ago, so I headed over to the Tate Modern for the Man Ray/Duchamp/Picabia exhibition. I'd forgotten about Shibboleth, the infamous crack in the floor, and it resonated with me far more than anything by the modernist masters. It's surprisingly impressive, although the grandeur of the surrounding turbine hall probably helps, and I wandered around for quite a while, just taking in the atmosphere and people-watching. There've been accidents, so signs and attendants conspicuously warned against falling in. I took a few pictures, mainly because it was a good chance to test out Photoshop's panorama features:
I didn't do a particularly good job with this one - too much vertical movement - but while merging it this evening I spotted something:
The ghost of a soul lost down the crack? Or a bizarre artefact of Photoshop's auto-blending? You decide.
Lightroom 2.0 beta
Abode released a beta of Lightroom 2.0 this morning, which was quite the surprise. The feature list is impressive, but most interesting are:
- Much better Photoshop integration. Images can now be sent directly into CS3 without requiring an export. It can also send a group of pictures straight through to be merged into a panorama or HDR image. Now they've implemented this feature I really don't see the need for Bridge, Photoshop's built-in image browser.
- Localised masking. This is the big, attention-grabbing one - Lightroom can now edit specific areas of images. It's nicely implemented, although since it links so well into Photoshop I might just use that instead. Well, I say that. In practice it might be quicker to do lots in Lightroom - we'll see.
- Smart collections. These are a bit like iTunes' Smart Playlists. You can configure a bunch of rules, each with individual AND/OR inclusion settings, that give you a very nice way of focussing on specific images. So you can have a dynamically created set of recently-edited images, or anything with the keyword 'monkeys' taken last May, with a wide-angle lens. Etc..
- Dual-monitor support. I've got two monitors, so I can have the smaller one displaying an overview of an image as I change particular elements. Or it can show the grid of photos while I edit on the main monitor. My smaller monitor's colours are a bit dodgy, but it's still useful as a rough guide.
There's a fair bit more: export sharpening, better filters, a loupe in the details panel, and the interface has been overhauled and some of the existing features tweaked. A full guide is here.
Scott Kelby etc. have some introductory videos up, and their FAQ has some interesting details. They reckon the full version will be released June-ish, and there won't be any beta updates between now and then. No word on pricing yet.
I've been playing around with it today and they've certainly been listening to the feedback. Lots of things work just that bit better, but it's the Photoshop links that are the most useful for me. There are a couple of bugs, as is to be expected with betas, but nothing show-stopping yet. The program was pretty good already, but v2 adds enough that I can't see me not buying the upgrade.
Because I own version 1.3 I can invite people to be on the beta program for six months - otherwise you're limited to a 30-day trial - so let me know if you'd like an invite.
Photoshop Trials
I've a digital photography module this term - YAY - and it's going to involve some fairly intensive training in Photoshop CS2. I know my way around photo editing programs generally, but I'm sure there are plenty of gaps and I'm looking forward to having a professional around to show me what I'm doing wrong. The university has suites of Macs and high-end printers, but as they're two hours away I think it's sensible to get hold of Photoshop at home.
The student version of CS3 is £140, and while waiting to afford that I figured I'd download the 30-day trial. I picked up an enormous tutorial book from the library so I could have a play around, and promptly discovered that I already installed the trial last year. My 30 days are up, so I can't get in.
I know I can get around this by reinstalling Windows; there must therefore be something somewhere I can delete to reset the 30 days. Obviously Adobe make this difficult so people can't use the program indefinitely, which is fair enough. I could use a keygen and (illegally) unlock the trial to the full version but I have too much respect for my computer to start messing around with warez stuff. And I don't want to feel like I'm ripping anybody off. 30 days is more than reasonable...I just need them again 
Not a big worry, in the grand scheme of things. Little frustrating, though. I'll try to install it on my parents' laptop instead. I can only steal that a couple of times a week, but it's more powerful than my home computer anyway...
Learning The GIMP
I've been doing some freelance photoshopping work this week. Just your basic stuff - extracting objects from their backgrounds - but I always enjoy image editing and it's been a good refresher course in various techniques. I learnt Photoshop years ago using a dodgy copy, but as I don't use pirated software any more I've been trying The GIMP.
The GIMP is an open-source, freeware image-editing program that, while not as powerful as the newer versions of Photoshop, supports reasonably advanced features such as paths, channels etc.. It's powerful, but the learning curve is steep. A major roadblock is the interface: designed for Linux and ported to Windows, every panel is a separate window, and it's confusing as hell at first glance. A project called GIMPShop attempts to adapt the GIMP into the Photoshop interface, but it's only partially successful and tends to lag behind the latest GIMP releases, so I prefer to stick with the 'official' release. The lack of native Windows integration means the dialogs and controls are unfamiliar, all of which takes time to pick up. But I've been meaning to learn The GIMP properly for ages, and this was a great opportunity to finally get to grips with it.
I generally find open-source software to be extremely impressive, but full of small bugs. The GIMP (on Windows) is the same. There are no show-stoppers, just things you have to work around. Tools such as the eraser would occasionally just stop working, and a reset of the 'tool options' would fix the problem, despite apparently not changing anything (I am aware that my understanding of the software is limited, though, and I could just be missing something). There were a couple of problems with the window system not re-drawing properly on zooms, or after switching to other programs, but, again, nothing that didn't have a workaround, even if it was just restarting the program. I suspect these were to do with the linux windows-system port rather than the GIMP itself. Whether there are more or fewer bugs than commercial software I don't know - my instinct says commercial software like Photoshop just has the edge, bug-wise - but at least open-source software can be patched daily, or a skilled programmer could even do it themselves.
Other than the tool-reset issue, image-editing was a breeze. I was processing a few hundred images, and was able to set keyboard shortcuts I could whip through with my left hand, keeping my right on the mouse at all times. This sped things up tremendously. The GIMP saved into native .psd format without issue (I downloaded the 30-day demo of Photoshop CS3 just to check). The image selection tools were effective, consistent and fast; paths as wonderful / irritating to configure as ever. It didn't blink at importing twenty 2mb layers in one go, nor resizing all of them simultaneously.
The million-windows problem, by the way, is the first use I've found for Microsoft's multiple desktop powertoy - switching between a GIMP and regular desktop was very convenient.
The best discovery came late in the process, when a startup tip informed me of the eraser's un-delete function. Press Alt with the eraser and it'll put back anything you erased, no matter when you erased it. So if you realise at the end of an edit that your first magic-wand selection accidentally removed more of the object than intended, you can put it back without having to go through 25 undo-levels and repeat all your work. Photoshop probably does this too, but it's a feature I hadn't seen before and was really, really helpful.
Broadly, I was impressed. There was nothing in my Photoshop skillset The GIMP couldn't replicate, and I didn't have any more problems than the average with any new program. When you consider the hundreds of pounds even older versions of Photoshop still cost, that's remarkable. I'll have to investigate the many online tutorials, as I'm sure there's plenty left to learn.
Rock On
Hopefully it's ok to leech the bandwidth here - I don't get very much traffic. If not let me know and I'll replace it with a link.
Hello!
Hey, thanks for coming! I'm Andrew, and this is where my headthinks come to breed. They often meander around humanism and photography, but they're flighty and you can't trust them, so anything is possible.
Do feel free to email me - I get lonely:
Your hair looks swish, by the way - have you done something new?
Recent Comments
- vicky: going up this weekend having done all the welsh peaks except 4 snowdon, cant wait
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: what, how can u live in the 21 c and say that, probably a sexist thing
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: da iawn laura, cant believe what im hearing, all this fuss, anyway love the site, and i agree, normal people who swear and curse clomb mountains cos we live in the...
on Climbing Snowdon. - Andrew: Did a few quick test shots to check the light levels, then balanced the camera on the arm of a bench, set it for a 20s exposure and hoped for the best
on ISS. - lynsey: Wow, how did you take that photograph?
on ISS.
