After watching our popular Photoshop CS5 Essential Training course, and hearing all about the photo-developing power of Adobe Camera Raw, one of our members wanted to know how to open her JPEG files in Adobe Camera Raw directly from within iPhoto. With a few Preference-setting hoops to jump through, it is entirely possible to set up iPhoto and Photoshop so that you can use iPhoto as your Photo organizing database of choice and still use Camera Raw in Photoshop to edit your JPEGs. Here’s a quick video tutorial that shows you the path of least resistance:
Note that for quick one-way edits (meaning you don’t have any need to go back to iPhoto with your newly edited image), you can set the Photoshop preferences as shown in the video, then simply drag an image from your iPhoto preview window onto the Photoshop icon in your dock (if you’re working on a Mac) and the image will open in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). Also note, while I recorded this in Photoshop CS5, the preference settings are identical in Photoshop CS6. As a bonus, if you’re already using Photoshop CS6, expect to see some improvements to ACR developing, too.
Please keep the feedback and the thoughtful questions coming, we appreciate it. Do you have any follow-up questions you’ve noted after completing a lynda.com course? We’d love to hear them!
Interested in more?
• All Design courses on lynda.com
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In honor of yesterday’s announcement of Adobe’s Creative Suite 6, and the six newly released CS6 New Features courses on lynda.com, I thought this week’s Featured Five collection should expand to showcase six free movies from the lynda.com library. All of our new CS6 New Features courses (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks, plus Premiere Pro and After Effects CS6 which were released on April 12, 2012) are designed to help you discover the latest software updates, and how the new features may fit well with your workflow needs. With the introduction of the new Adobe Creative Cloud subscription model, which allows you to pay a flat fee to access all of the Suite applications, finding out what’s new across the Suite may now be more important than ever as you’ll be faced with new decisions during the upgrading process. To give you an idea of what our CS6 New Features courses have to offer, here are six free-to-everyone movies that discuss some of the interesting new abilities of the CS6 flagship applications. After you’ve checked out the featured six, make sure to let us know in the comments section which CS6 features have you the most intrigued.
1. Photoshop CS6 for Photographers New Features
You may have explored the Photoshop version of CS6 already, given that a public beta has been available for a few weeks. In Photoshop CS6 for Photographers New Features, Chris Orwig reviews the key features that are going to make a difference specifically for photographers. Some of the new features in Photoshop are pretty significant (not to mention extremely cool), but the one that might actually affect the most Photoshop users is the revamped Crop tool. In this free movie Chris demonstrates how the new Crop tool works in a much less destructive way than Crop tools of the past:
2. Illustrator CS6 New Features
Having just celebrated its 25th anniversary, Illustrator is a fairly mature product in the software world. Despite it’s industry years, there is no lack of interesting upgrades to the vector graphic program this year. For one thing, you’ll notice that like Photoshop, Illustrator has gone to a dark interface, which gives it quite a modern look despite its advanced age. There are also a few cool new ways to tackle old tricks, including a vastly updated pattern creator. Here’s a free movie from Justin Seeley‘s Illustrator CS6 New Features course that shows how the new Pattern Options panel works:
3. InDesign CS6 New Features
When I asked the author of this course, Anne-Marie Concepcion, what her favorite feature from InDesign CS6 was, she said, “I think my favorite feature would be the Auto-Size text frames option. It’s not exciting like the neat-o Liquid Layout, but Auto-Size is something I can use right now and something I will be using every day.” It’s always those features that you use every day and can’t remember living without that make a software upgrade significant, even if they’re not the sexiest new technology options. In this video from the InDesign CS6 New Features course, Anne-Marie talks about the new Auto-Size text frames option and why it makes her life easier:
4. Dreamweaver CS6 New Features
Dreamweaver CS6 has a bunch of new features, including interface, optimization, and FTP support enhancements, but it’s the CSS capabilities that have author James Williamson intrigued. By employing the CSS Transitions feature housed in a convenient new Dreamweaver panel, you can easily add and manage your transitions. You don’t need to take my word for it, though, you can hear the enthusiasm for Dreamweaver CS6′s support of CSS transitions in James’ voice in this free movie from the Dreamweaver CS6 New Features course:
5. Fireworks CS6 New Features
Fireworks is the Creative Suite app that helps you produce optimized web graphics for any device. In this excerpt from Fireworks CS6 New Features, Ray Villalobos shows off his favorite new Fireworks feature, which is support for creating and exporting CSS Sprites. In the video, Ray demonstrates how you can now use Fireworks to simultaneously help with graphics and the hover state of graphics:
6. Flash Professional CS6 New Features
The CS6 version of Flash Professional has new support for 3D, and a new framework for exporting HTML. In this free movie from Flash CS6 New Features, Anastasia McCune focuses on the new Captive AIR runtime option for creating Android, OSX, or Windows apps. You can now decide if you want your Flash apps to run with Captive AIR embedded or if you want to require that users download the AIR runtime. In this video, Anastasia considers why you might want to choose one option or the other:
If you’d like to see more free CS6 tutorials, we’ll have a lot more coming to lynda.com in the next few weeks. While you’re checking out the new CS6 Suite, also keep in mind that 10 percent of all lynda.com content is free to try. Just click on any of the blue links on any course table of contents page in our library to watch unlocked videos.
I’ll be back next week with five more free selections—but in the meantime, I’ll be checking out what CS6 has to offer. Which CS6 features do you have your eye on?
When you shoot portraits—whether of individuals, families, or business groups—are you posing your subjects to look their best?
In the latest lynda.com photography course, Family and Group Portraiture, author Natalie Fobes (former photographer for the Seattle Times and National Geographic) describes the techniques behind successful group portraits, including tips for posing individual subjects, large groups, and families. She also details how to work with subjects to minimize those things they’d rather not have committed to pixels.
Natalie’s new course is just one of our recent photography releases. If you’re interested in Adobe’s new Photoshop Lightroom 4, don’t miss the new Lightroom 4 Essentials series, with Chris Orwig. The first two installments are available now, with more coming very soon.
This year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to commission portraits of each of the 20 2012 Oscar-nominated actors and actresses.
Who did they call? Renowned photographer (and lynda.com author) Douglas Kirkland, who has photographed hundreds of actors and performers in his storied career. The resulting portraits form an exhibit called Out of Character, which is on display at the Academy’s Beverly Hills headquarters until March 18.
Last Friday, Douglas gave a few of us an exhibit tour, during which he talked about the portraits and his process. We’re pleased to be able to share it with you. Check it out, then check out his Douglas Kirkland on Photography series.
Perhaps you’ve heard the saying “the best camera is the one that’s with you.”
For millions of people, that camera is an Apple iPhone. The iPhone’s popularity has led to a flood of photography-related apps and a thriving community of iPhone photographers who meet up in person and share photos using the wildly popular Instagram site.
The iPhone’s popularity as a camera has also led to our first course devoted to “iPhoneography.” The course, callediPhone Photography, from Shooting to Storytelling, is taught by Richard Koci Hernandez and is our latest photography course.
When we set out to do a course on iPhone photography, it was obvious that we needed to cover shooting tips and cool photo apps, but we also wanted to celebrate the iPhone photography community. We wanted to show the fun and mutual inspiration that comes from sharing visual stories with other people. We wanted to capture the spirit of communal creativity that happens when photographers get together and interact.
Our opportunity came last October, when the world’s first iPhone photography conference took place in San Francisco. We attended the conference and shot video of the sessions and then enjoyed shooting a morning photo walk through San Francisco’s Mission District. We even used the iPhone 4S to shoot some of the photo walk video.
Shooting with Richard Koci Hernandez during the 1197 Conference photo walk. Photo Credit: Jim Heid
After the conference, we hit the road with author and multimedia photojournalist Richard Koci Hernandez. We tagged along as he went shooting on the streets of Los Angeles, and then we returned to the studio, where he shared tips for his favorite photography apps as well as insights on the art of visual storytelling.
We think the course reflects the creative excitement surrounding the world of iPhone photography. It was a fun course to work on, and we hope you’ll find it a fun course to watch.
(And if you’d like to hear more from Richard Koci Hernandez, don’t miss the Richard Koci Hernandez, Multimedia Journalist Creative Inspirations documentary we did about him last year.)
Earlier this week, Adobe released a public beta version of Lightroom 4, its popular photo-editing and asset-management software for Macs and Windows PCs. The new version is free for the testing: you can download it, try it out, and provide feedback that may influence the final version.
To help you get up to speed with what’s new, we’ve published Photoshop Lightroom 4 Beta Preview with Chris Orwig. It’s a two-hour tour of Lightroom 4′s new features including its enhanced photo- and video-editing features, its ability to tag your photos to a map, and its Blurb book-layout module.
And because free is a very good price, we’ve made the entire course free, meaning, you don’t have to be a lynda.com member in order to watch it. But as they say on the TV commercials for knives that can slice through Kryptonite, act now to take advantage of this limited-time offer. The Lightroom 4 beta software expires at the end of March, and when it does, we’ll retire this course.
We will be updating the blog periodically with posts that spotlight some of Lightroom 4′s new features, but if you’re curious to see what’s new right now, download the beta preview and check out Chris’s course. Just keep in mind that the software is in prerelease form. It likely has bugs, and you shouldn’t use it for anything critical, including slicing through Kryptonite.
Looking for a holiday gift with a personal touch? Three new courses—and a special discount offer—can help you create one-of-a-kind holiday gifts using Blurb.
The best part: through November 30 lynda.com members get a 20-percent discount* on all Blurb orders! Just use the promotional code LYNDA22 at checkout.
Happy learning—and happy holidays!
*Offer expires November 30, 2011 at 11:59 PM local time. Enter promo code LYNDA22 at checkout. A 20 percent discount will be applied towards your order at checkout (maximum discount is USD $200.00, GBP £100.00, EUR €160,00, CAD $210.00, or AUD $180.00 off product totals). This offer is good for one-time use and cannot be combined with other promotional codes, volume discounts, gift cards, or used for adjustments on previous orders.
Street photography captures people at their most unguarded. There’s no posing, no preparation, and no encouragement involving the word “cheese.” Just point and shoot—often without even breaking stride.
Street photography is an honorable photographic genre that counts among its practitioners such legends as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Pedro Meyer. It’s a genre I’ve experimented with when traveling precisely because of its candid quality: If part of what makes a place is its people, then capturing unposed photos of those people is a critical part of documenting the essence of a place.
In Le Marais, Paris. Photo: Jim Heid
But street photography is also potentially controversial, and we’ve noticed a lot of blog and Twitter chatter about it lately. Part of the controversy deals with privacy: does a photographer have a legal right to photograph someone without his or her permission? The general guideline, at least in the United States, is yes, provided that the subject is in a public place where there isn’t an expectation of privacy, such as a sidewalk, a park, or a street.
Another part of the controversy deals with what I’ll charitably call bad manners. Some street photographers employ a paparazzi shooting style that involves putting their cameras uncomfortably close to a stranger’s face—sometimes even hiding around corners or behind phone booths before doing so.
Besides being rude, this style of street photography destroys exactly what the genre does best: capturing people at a moment when being photographed is the last thing on their minds. Look at some paparazzi-style street shots, and you’ll see photos of people who are startled, annoyed, or hamming it up for the camera. In all three cases, the candid, unguarded moment is lost.
Since we shot that documentary, Koci has embraced Apple’s iPhone as a tool for street photography. A couple of weeks ago, he led photo walks through San Francisco and discussed iPhone photography at the 1197 conference in San Francisco. As one of the sponsors of the event, lynda.com was there shooting video for an iPhone photography course.
The first time you try them out, Photoshop filters can be sort of fun, turning your images into a pastel drawing or giving them a chrome effect. But as Deke points out in this week’s free technique, you’ll soon realize that many of these built-in filters are nothing you’d actually want to use. So instead, Deke has used a familiar tool to a surprising purpose this week, by using Adobe Camera Raw to create some filter-like recipes that result in usable effects. And you don’t need to use raw-format photos to make it work, either.
He begins with this image (shot by lynda.com‘s own Jacob Cunningham), which does happen to be a raw image to which Deke applies conventional Camera Raw processing in order to set his starting point:
For his first effect, Deke uses a negative Clarity value to reduce the edge contrast and a negative Vibrance setting to leach out the most vivid colors in the image. He then adds back some saturation to return the glow of the model’s skin tone.
Next, Deke takes the same image, and applies a bleached effect that’s centered around the application of a drastic temperature reduction. Who needs Instagram when you have ACR?
The third effect emulates old school cross-processing (as if you were developing one kind of film with a process designed for another) by adjusting the temperature and tone, then setting vibrance and saturation at odds. The result is this interesting effect:
The next recipe applies an etched effect, which gives our good-natured model an almost other-worldly look. This part of the technique involves tweaking the Recovery, Fill, Blacks, Contrast, and Clarity values.
Finally, because you’ve undoubtedly come to expect extremes from Deke, he’ll show you how he used the Tone Curve to set the different levels inside the image at extremes with one another, resulting in this stark treatment:
Five photo-processing filters in under nine minutes. And all along, you’re applying your effect to duplicates of an original smart object, so everything is non-destructive and you can riff off of Deke’s ideas without harming your original image.
And if that’s not enough, members of the lynda.com Online Training Library® can view another new movie in which Deke shares his sixth and most outrageous filter effect inside Adobe Camera Raw. It’s Deke—you can occasionally question his taste but never his talent. And you never know what the inspirational effects of going over the edge might be.
Every week, there’s a free techniques from Deke!
Interested in more?
• The entire Deke’s Techniques collection
• courses on Photoshop in the Online Training Library®
• courses by Deke McClelland in the Online Training Library®
This week, that ever-wily Deke thinks of an ingenious way to cover your Photoshop tracks. If you recall, last week’s techniques (both the free movie and the members-only video inside the Online Training Library®) were about combining photos of three real-world creatures to create one other-worldly one. But as we all know, no missing link photo is ever going to be credible if it’s not noisy, blurry, and oddly exposed. Turns out, the key is to actually shoot an unstable picture of your Photoshop screen with your camera, then add a few more helpings of weird exposure (inside Camera Raw), grain (the noise filter in Photoshop) and more blur (of the Gaussian variety).
Here is Deke’s final photo-documentation of his pseudo creature:
Editor’s note: Deke’s creature was so elusive that I had to experiment using the technique on another mysterious creature “captured” in its natural environment. For my particular version, I used my iPhone set to HDR mode, pointed it at my screen where I’d paused this week’s video, and twirled the phone to make the motion. Still scary, I think.
Every week there’s a new free technique from Deke. And next week we’ll move from this uncommon creature to a very ordinary Photoshop task: changing the color of a car. And as normal as that sounds, even the everyday task requires good technique. Find out Deke’s technique next week.
