Photoshop
Fine Art Photograpy
I have 3 new prints available in my print store in the photographic gallery. I love nostalgic moods and distressed textures. These photos seemed to lend themselves well to that sort of interpretation. Most of the distressing and aging effects were done with PS captured brushes. Hope you enjoy them.
Photoshop Ghosts
This is Seth (on the left), I met him a couple of years ago at Kennesaw Mt. National Battlefield, NW of Atlanta. Still dutifully manning his artillery postion after 140 years, he insisted on reading me a letter from home. He doesn’t know he’s a ghost and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Atlanta would fall a few short months later.
Seth reading me his letter from home
So, whats this tongue in cheek silliness all about? Be wary before you fall for photo “proof” of something fantastic and unbelievable. Just about anything can be faked these days and quite easily at that. But then you probably already knew that. It is fun to mess around with though.
My Simple Photoshop Ghost Recipe
1) In Photoshop I opened the Civil War photo file, selected the soldier and dragged him into the photo file with me by the cannon. Doing this creates a new layer.
2) After sizing and positioning the soldier I added a layer mask and masked out parts of him by painting on the mask to make him fit behind the cannon barrel.
3) I made a copy of the soldier layer and added a horizontal motion blur value of about 60 or so to the copy. I set the opacity of this blurred layer to about 70% and put it beneath the original in the layer order, offsetting the blurred layer by just a hair so that it wasn’t perfectly lined up with the original on top.
4) The original soldier layer I set to an opacity of about 60% and then I painted on the layer mask with a soft airbrush to fade out areas I wished to be even more transparent or vanish altogether.
5) To add a sepia tone to all the Photoshop layers simply add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer at the top, click the colorize check box and adjust the hue and saturation until you get the color you want.
Photoshop’s Number One Fan!
Too funny!
Rust, Cracks and Stone Textures
Thanks to DesignM.ag for these excellent compilations of Photoshop brushes and textures
150 Free Rust Brushes for Photoshop
Pixel Pushing Predigiosity
Or … How Photoshop Changed My Life.
We can argue later about whether predigiosity is really a word (don’t think it is) but for now lets talk about life changing stuff. Few things can be called life-changing. Fewer still can claim to have changed the world as we know it. Things like automobiles, airplanes, the telephone, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups come to mind (yeah ok, that last one’s a stretch, but its close). Photoshop falls into both categories but maybe not in the way you think. While it may not have changed your life per se, it has changed the way you view the images of life whether you realize it or not. You may have never made one single click inside its considerably powerful interface, but you view its effects every single day, and as a result you frequently view an altered reality. Photoshop has changed everyone’s life, their world, or, at the very least, some degree of perception of that world.
For the artist/photographer (like me), it has also changed my professional life and my personal enjoyment in ways I could not have predicted. As a teenager with a budding art talent pushing to set itself free, I also pursued photography as an outlet of artistic expression and creativity. With no money or place to have a darkroom, I had to content myself with slides or dime store prints from my negatives, sending off to a lab only occasionally for that special enlargement and leaving the nuances of custom printing and retouching to pros. My talents eventually morphed into a career in graphic design, illustration and a continued interest in photography. Photoshop is the most important program in a whole suite of programs that has completely changed my professional life. Not a workday goes by that I don’t open Photoshop for some reason or another. It has put money in my pocket, food on my table and clothes on my back. It has also afforded me hours of pleasure as a darkroom, the likes of which I could never have imagined as a teenager. It has become the retouching and illustration tool only imagined in science fiction only 20+ years ago when Photoshop was just a gleam in some programmer’s eye. So, there it is. Photoshop’s cool! ‘Nuf said. And on its twentieth birthday I’m more than happy to give it a little love.
Photoshop 20th Anniversary Event
If you’re into celebrations and benchmarks and think Photoshop is the absolute best program ever, then celebrate you should – Photoshop’s twentieth birthday to be exact. NAPP along with Scott Kelby, his Photoshop User TV mates, Matt Kloskowski, and Dave Cross and members of the Adobe team will join together in a streaming live celebration event tonight at 7:30 to pay homage to the program of programs – Photoshop.
Photoshop 20th Anniversary Event – Celebrate with Adobe and NAPP
Photo Makeover
Excellent set of techniques from Blog.SpoonGraphics to apply to just about any photo in Photoshop and make it better.
Photoshop Malpractice
Many of us Photoshop veterans (I guess with 18 years PS experience I’m a legit veteran) have learned about bad practices the hard way. But you don’t have to if you start with this collection of common PS user mistakes. I agree with the post and the big pay off in avoiding these is in efficiency and achieving top notch professional results. Worth a look.
12 Common Photoshop Mistakes, Misuses and Abuses | The Design Cubicle.
Free Photoshop Plugins You Might Actually Use
Sometimes the exhausting Free-Everything-for-Photoshop lists can be, well, exhausting. Who has time to check out 500 sites worth of Photoshop freebies and wade through tons of marginally useful stuff to find the gems. Maybe I’m just getting too old. Thanks to Photoshop Roadmap for this list of 15 free Photoshop Plugins which is thoughtfully selected, presented and previewed. Not to mention many of these free plugins seem pretty useful.
