Talk by Richard Curtis on Adobe Photoshop Software, Tuesday 28th March

Hi Folks,

Talk by Richard Curtis on Adobe Photoshop Software, Tuesday 28th March

Last night Richard Curtis from Adobe Software came along to give us a talk on Photoshop and Light room software.

Richard is a Principal Solutions Consultant at Adobe.

Richard started by telling us about the Adobe ‘Cloud’ which encompasses many Adobe systems including the possibility of mobile phone data being transferred to a PC via ‘Cloud’. However, for me this talk was from another world as I don’t have a mobile phone on WiFi.

In the past Adobe have worked strongly on using APPS but a new Project called ‘Nimbus’ is coming to make things more PC based and having a new editing and storage system to keep Adobe ahead of the game. However, looking it up on the internet (as I understand it) ‘Nimbus’ won’t be made available to the general public yet.

I have up until now been on ‘Cloud Nine’ for my blogs until last night looking down at my notes to find I hadn’t really taken anything in lol.

but hopefully if you are interested, Richard has various links available to help people out.

Richard gave various demonstrations and in the first we were shown an image taken inside the Taj Mahal however it had a blown out door at the far end.

The development tool was used to take down the highlights of the door and also lighten the shadows.

Richard gave a tip, that it is best to change the image into monochrome first as it changes the eye’s perception of the original image and makes it easier to get the correct changes needed. There are sliders that shows when things are too bright or too dark.

A member of the audience said that they used Elements to do some of the detailed work after using various options in Photoshop.

Richard pointed out that Elements only uses 8 bits of colour compared with 16 bits in Photoshop and some of the colour data will be lost.

However, if the image was only for use with Face Book or other internet sites it wouldn’t matter, as images are compressed and data stripped out to fit their sizes.

The next image of four cowboy’s needed to be enhanced leaving the background untouched.

There is a tool to allow one to put a radial focus around the cowboys and enhance the detail within that ring leaving the background untouched.

Another tip is to use a vignette to focus the eye’s into a required area.

In this image we were shown a wonky garage and there is an option tool called ‘Transform’ which can be used to straighten objects and make any lens corrections.

There are various choices inside the ‘Transform’ option to attempt it.

Another example which was said to be more difficult was this image but the Photoshop software is fairly clever at working out things.

but can still gets the poles above the fence on a slant.

but a further adjustment and these are straightened out.

A better example was shown of a balcony not on the level.

This was a first attempt.

And then another choice from the option was used to allow Richard to place arrows from the bottom edge of the structure to the top which tells the software where to straighten it. Unfortunately it is not so easy to follow the different choice options on the screen but at least people will now know they are there.

Then Richard introduced us to another option available called ‘The Smart Object Route’ which is a bit mind blowing to us non users of Photoshop but as I understand it Adobe can just grab the RAW coding from one’s camera and covert it into a non destructible file. One can use various colour formulas from different cameras.

At this point there was a desperate shout from the audience of “Coffee time” as I looked down at my scant notes I wondered how I was going to put this blog together lol

COFFEE TIME

Anyway, this non destructible image sits in ‘The Smart Object Route’ as a layer and because it cannot be changed a second blank layer is made which can store any changes made to the image, so things like a stone in the forefront of the image can be remove in a similar way to cloning. All the changes are registered in the additional layers.

White spots can be removed by the blending tool and Richard showed us two ways of removing the white snow under the bird without moving the bird’s tail. One of these two ways wasn’t supposed to have achieved it but did lol.

As I understand it, a selection of colour near the bird is picked from the background and only the white will disappear leaving the bird’s black tail intact.

Another spot of snow was near the horse’s nose and that was cloned out.

It was advisable to store the file keeping the layers, as once it has been flattened one can’t go back to any of the changes made. Although it may look good on screen a printer may throw up dust marks etc not seen.

Moving on

Apparently the first darkroom photography was processed in 1850 and with new chemicals today the photographs can be produced in the light as the new generation of chemicals are not affected by light.

I understand Photoshop can now replicate the results of various chemical used.

To be honest I found this talk all a bit over my head and was probably more of a benefit to Photoshop users but hope it gives some idea of the evening to others

Next week is the

Instant Slide Battle