Andrew Macpherson

There are a lot of Photoshop Video Podcasts out there, many directly brokered by the iTunes store.  I’m a great podcast fan for storing interesting speech for driving, for the train and tube, but the video podcasts are not such a great idea on any medium other than one’s laptop, or I suppose an iPad, though I’m not sure if the screen is big enough on that.

There are 2 axes they can be judged on beyond the simple quality.  One is how far away from the product they stray — are they about Photoshop, or are we in the 3D effects of Photoshop Extended, are we integrating with Adobe Illustrator.  The other noticeable dimension is the photo to artwork axis, with some of the talks being in a zone delineated by the advertising message, and using techniques that work only in relatively low resolution.

My needs as an aspiring amateur stop at presenting my photographs well, whether for club competition,  or as a gallery wrap canvas of a family portrait that someone’s prepared to pay for.  so I’m only going to point you at ‘casts which meet my needs most of the time, and don’t overwhelm the viewer with advertising — some is OK to pay for the content after all, but some casts are 75% advert 20%chat and 5% content.  I may be missing really good content because I haven’t found it (yet), but there are ‘casts that I’m deliberately not mentioning too.

So what shows am I finding Useful? (continue reading…)

NeoCube

My friend David very kindly gave me a cute toy for the Solstice — a set of Neodymium spherical magnets marketed as the NeoCube — they’re fairly small but extremely powerful. Once one gets over being able to have a handful of ball-bearings that don’t go flying off in all directions,the obvious use is for still life exercises.  One can make rather amazing structures as the photo demonstrates, and the videos on the company’s website are an entree to endless hours of frustration.

So anyway it’s a nice difficult subject to light and photograph.  highly polished spherical items.  I had fun with soft-boxes, and black and white foam boards till I got a set of reflections that I liked,  Then the fun begins, to try to photograph it.  The image will only be in focus for very slightly more than a hemisphere at F11 with a full set of macro tubes.  I’ll be making a later post with some good links about circles of confusion, hyperfocal distance and the digital vs film non-issue triggered by thinking about this. (continue reading…)

I just had a query from an obviously photoshop-savvy reader about how to use the file I provided, so in case there’s anyone else out there who does not like to ask….

The file just needs to be dropped into the same folder as any other meta-tag profiles you create to set author / address / copyright notice by saving a completed profile — then when you want photoshop to show that © copyright symbol the file will appear as an option in the Bridge append metadata and replace metadata menus — see the screenshot below  You can select a set of files in Bridge and mark them all as copyright rather than opening the properties of each individually.

Possibly worth pointing out how to save a profile — if you highlight a single photo then go to the bottom of the File menu in bridge there is a File Info option.

Select that and a form will pop up to allow you to set various aspects of the metadata.

You’ll probably want to set Author and the copyright notice and url on the general page, most of the IPTC data and possibly some of the origin data (credit / source) if you work through an agency, or need to credit your company. If you apply that to your photo you can then go to the Tools menu and, with the photo still highlighted select Create Metadata Template that will read in the values that bridge will allow you to save, and you can check the ones you really want to save for applying to other pictures.

When you save your new profile, remember what name you give to the file, and you can then search for that name to find the correct folder to put the copyright setting file you’ve downloaded from my blog (right-click here and SAVE AS), and once it’s in place it’ll just appear in your menu

Hope that helps!

A weekend away in Hereford, and many shots with a very bright, largely overcast sky.  Not completely lacking texture, but almost completely blown by the time one’s foreground was exposed.

So the first thought is “Oh no here we HDR again,” but actually the answer is given in the Adobe TV movie “Learn Photoshop CS4 – Make local adjustments in Camera Raw“ the adjustment brush got down between the ruined walls of Llanthony Priory to let me reduce the exposure on the sky to the point where the texture my eyes had seen was also there in the image.

The skies the following day had a similar burnout problem, but in this case triggered by shooting up-light into the haze from the overnight rain evaporating which you will still see at the horizon, and for them, with their very different skyline, the answer was the Graduated Filter illustrated in the same video.

I love my MacBook Air, it’s beautifully light and small.  Mostily it’s light, and so can go in my camera bag when I travel without my having to turf out half my lenses (except when flying Ryanair), so it was a great blow when the hinge fell apart.

It turns out that this is a well documented failure mode, for some units.  Just a well, as replacing two bits of shoddy plastic hinge might otherwise cost £350, to replace the whole screen.  The repair was rejected by 2 authorized repairers before I got on to Apple directly citing the notes in their own fora.  Apple of course came up trumps, and said that their repairers had been notified to watch out for this fault.

However since it came back the keyboard and track pad (did I say how nice the track pad on these is BTW?) have gone out to lunch, been replaced, and on arriving back here again were both still away for coffee — not even working at bios level.  :-( .   This time I plugged in an external keyboard and mouse, to un-register Photoshop before sending it away again — two weeks with Photoshop in three months is difficult, even when you have 16G CF cards in your camera. (continue reading…)

One of the first strange things one finds with Adobe’s EXIF metadata templates is that putting in a copyright notice does not set the © symbol when the modified image is opened.   Now I’m assuming that either one wants to use the advanced mode in Bridge to set Author data, Source, Copyright notice etc for every image when one loads one’s pictures, or apply a metadata template to a set of already loaded images.

Picture of a copyright image opened in photoshop

The only way Adobe gives one to set Copyright Status is through the drop down menu on the File Info window on a file-by-file basis.  Saving the metadata template does not include the XML to apply it to the next file.

So one can do some searching, and find the changes to make to the xmp files in “Library/Application Support/Adobe/XMP/Metadata Templates/” (MacOS) and that’s fine for those who grok XML, the changes between the XML for CS2 and CS4, and are happy using emacs (there should not be a final new line in the file, but vim will add one).  Having done all that I thought I would simplify it for everyone else with a small xmp file that you can drop into your ‘Metadata Templates‘ directory which will only set your Copyright Status.

Do have a look at it first to assure yourself that it is what I say [that's only good practice with things you download from the internet!].  It should read:

<?xpacket begin="" id="W5M0MpCehiHzreSzNTczkc9d"?>
<x:xmpmeta xmlns:x="adobe:ns:meta/" x:xmptk="Adobe XMP Core 4.2.2-c063 53.352624, 2008/07/30-18:05:41 ">
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
<rdf:Description rdf:about=""
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:photoshop="http://ns.adobe.com/photoshop/1.0/"
xmlns:Iptc4xmpCore="http://iptc.org/std/Iptc4xmpCore/1.0/xmlns/"
xmlns:xmpRights="http://ns.adobe.com/xap/1.0/rights/">
<xmpRights:Marked>True</xmpRights:Marked>
</rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>
</x:xmpmeta>
<?xpacket end="w"?>

Enjoy