iD News and Blog

Tilt-Shift Photography, or How to Make Everything Look Tiny

This is a large format camera:

Unlike your digital camera (which most likely doesn’t even need you to focus), or an old-school SLR film camera (which only needs focus, shutter speed, and aperture), a large format camera has a lot of controls. Check out how each piece moves in 3 dimensions in the picture below:

2 of the adjustments you can make are called tilt and shift. Without getting TOO technical, what you’re doing is moving different focus planes to interact with each other in a way that you can’t really do with other cameras, thus selecting a certain region of the film to be in focus. There are modern tools that can do this on modern cameras (even digital!) – for example, lensbaby.com offers a lens that can make those adjustments. What will this do for you? You may remember this picture from a previous blog entry:

So, if you don’t have an extra $350 to spend on a lens (ok, let’s face it, you’re going to use it to buy video games and Mt. Dew), you can still acheive this same effect with a Gaussian Blur. It’s a great effect. You take a picture of normal sized people and magically they become miniatures!

Select a round (circular or oval-shaped) selection around the center, in focus, portion of your photo. Invert your selection and feather it by a lot. 100 pixels isn’t too many. Select Gaussian Blur from the filters section and experiment with settings. Can you make a photo look like these?

Email me *your* contributions at justin(at)internaldrive.com (@ symbol left out intentionally to prevent robotic spam crawling!) and I’ll post the best ones in a future entry.

 

Tags: iD Tech Camp, photography, Photoshop
Posted in iD Tech Bloggers | No Comments »

 

 

New Feature in Photoshop CS4 – Click and Drag Adjustments

Todays lesson: how to click and drag to change selected parameters in the “adjustments” selection in Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Click here to open in new window.

Stay tuned for more blogs and vlogs!

 

Tags: Adobe, CS4, id tech, Photoshop, tips, tools, tricks
Posted in iD Tech Bloggers | No Comments »

 

 

Be a pro at Photoshop CS4 by using keyboard shortcuts

All of us have that friend – the computer wizard. Even among the so-called power users, some people still shine as outstanding. What’s their secret? One secret to super-speed is to know the shortcuts for the programs you’re using. We all hunt through menus to find what we’re looking for, but that’s for newbs. Once you start getting expert, sorting through menus just takes time that could be better spent tweaking details in your images.

Enter the keyboard shortcut. This is how those speedy users get so fast. One key combo, and they’ve zoomed in, or saved, or switched from one image to another. Try it yourself! Here (thanks to Trevor Morris) is an awesome resource; all of the keyboard shortcuts for CS4 – both Mac and PC versions!

 

Tags: CS4, efficient, keyboard shortcuts, Photoshop, timesaver
Posted in iD Tech Bloggers | 1 Comment »

 

 

Saving Time With the Actions Manager

It’s me again.  If you’re like me, you really aren’t into reading directions.  Particularly when it comes to computer applications (and games), I prefer to dive in head-first and just start working, clicking through menus and exploring the various options and what they do.  Therefore, I don’t always go as deep into applications as I would had I taken a seminar or class, or read a book.  With Photoshop CS4, however, I have found some really cool features!  One of my favorites is the action manager: you can use it to manage repetitive tasks.  For instance, I scan a lot of photos, and when all of the photos are the same initial size, I end up doing the same thing, over and over.  I cut my scanning time in half by using the actions manager (which you can get to by making sure that windows/actions is checked) to record an entire action that you often repeat.  I use it to connect to the scanner, scan a set sized photo, and save it, all with one keystroke.  All I have to do is swap photos, hit that key, and I’m ready to go again – no more mousing around in menus.

CS4 has been very, very good to me.

 

Tags: computer camp, CS4, macro, photography, Photoshop, recording, time saving
Posted in iD Tech Bloggers | No Comments »