Learning to play a game and learning to use Photoshop follow two, very different patterns. In the first you “discover” how the game is played, you fiddle with the buttons, try combinations, have eureka moments and eventually become proficient at it. Learning Photoshop, on the other hand, requires extensive tutorials and help; books are available from thin “easy-to-use” instruction books to heavy tomes many hundreds of pages long. Read more…
A few years ago, graphic designer Grey Jay was asked by a company to create a Photoshop action that would emulate a “toy camera” look for photos. He came up with an action he calls the “Holgarizer” and, after some tweaking and adjusting, has made it freely available to the public. If a messy cross-processed look is what you’re after, Jay’s filter does the job. You can download the ZIP file here.
Yesterday we were whimsically wondering what life would be like if we could Photoshop away some of life’s more unpleasant moments, and today we’ve stumbled onto a different approach in the form of the Retouch Mirror. The mirror, which will cost you about $85 from Atypyk, is a fun bathroom accessory for photographers who want to make their morning routine feel more like a post-processing session. If you don’t want to drop $85, you can always convert your existing mirror into a Retouch Mirror using these Photoshop magnets.
The big news spreading across the internet is that Adobe CS6 officially released today. The announcement, which confirms previous rumors of a May 7th ship date, came late last night and means that we can all finally get our hands on Content-Aware Move and all of the other features we’ve been dying to try.
Those who want to opt for Creative Cloud will have to wait a few more days, however, as Adobe has announced that it won’t be going live with the subscription version of its service until May 11th.
There’s been a lot of controversy around magazines using Photoshop to make real people look unrealistically pretty or fit, but what if you could actively Photoshop what you saw and experienced? That’s the question the people over at Cracked decided to ask, and the answers are pretty hilarious: Read more…
It’s common knowledge that models in magazines are Photoshopped to look the way that they do — often to the detriment of the young girls that aspire to have these computer generated figures — but for the most part protests have come in the form of ad campaigns like Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. But in the past couple of weeks, 14-year-old Julia Bluhm decided to take a different approach. Read more…
On Monday Adobe officially announced its upcoming Creative Cloud subscription service, which will allow users to “rent” CS6 for $50 a month or Photoshop by itself for $20 a month. Whitson Gordon over at Lifehacker did some calculations on whether subscribing is actually worth it. Here’s his conclusion:
If you’re upgrading from a previous version of the program, it’s quite a bit cheaper to just grab the upgrade from Adobe instead of subscribing. And, if you can get a student discount (which nearly anyone can do), that’ll be cheaper too—at least in the case of Photoshop, which doesn’t seem to offer a subscription for students. In the case of the Master Collection, the student subscription is cheaper than the regular student version, but still not cheaper than upgrading from a previous version. However, once you get past the two year mark, all bets are off—the subscription is more expensive than buying, even if you plan on upgrading every two years.
[...] our official recommendation is to stick with the retail versions unless you only plan on using your Adobe product for under two years. The subscription is great for the short run [...], but it’ll cost you quite a bit more in the long run.
Adobe’s John Nack also writes that one of the huge benefits of the new model is that it drastically reduces the barrier to entry. Previously you had to pay $700 to get started with using Photoshop. Now the cost is $20.
Adobe is currently holding the launch event for the highly anticipated Creative Suite 6 in San Francisco today, making it a big day for Photoshop enthusiasts everywhere. Official release will be coming “within 30 days” according to Adobe, but the event has revealed enough to whet our appetites and give us some pricing options we can chew over. Read more…
A strange bit of news coming out of China: couples are opting to have their wedding photos faked using Photoshop due to rising photography costs.
Rising cost of a wedding photo-shoot is forcing some Chinese couples to get their wedding albums prepared with the help of morphing offered by various online photography-related agencies. With the help of computer software like Photoshop, a couple’s ordinary photo can be added with wedding dresses, flowers or even a tropical island setting to create faux wedding images.
While the cost of a professional shoot in China can run upwards of $950, having your wedding photo album faked by online Photoshopping businesses only costs $50.
The Web Platform Team over at Adobe is currently working on bringing Photoshop-style blending modes to HTML, which would allow fancier websites and easier transitions from the company’s design tools to the web. If they succeed in publishing the spec through W3C and having it implemented in WebKit, web designers will soon be able to make use of a new CSS property called “blend-mode” that can take the same values as the blending mode drop down menu in Photoshop (e.g. normal, multiply, screen, overlay, color-dodge).
