PopPhoto Flash

Want the new Photoshop? You might need a new Mac.

Not so long ago, Apple announced that, with the release of their upcoming OS upgrade to Snow Leopard, they'll no longer support machines using the PowerPC processor. Yesterday, Adobe announced that it will follow suit. If you're a PowerPC Mac user and you want the next version of the Creative Suite, you'll need to go Intel before you upgrade your software.

Why now? With the transition to 64-bit on the Mac side, Adobe simply doesn't have the resources to do all that coding. Not to mention that the youngest PowerPC machines are four years old, and the assumption is that folks who are hesitant to upgrade their computers are less likely to upgrade their software. John Nack has more details on his Adobe blog, or you can check out the official FAQ.

--Debbie Grossman
Senior Editor

Tip of the Day: Selective Coloring in Adobe Lightroom

This tutorial makes selective coloring a breeze in Adobe Lightroom.  By making use of the adjustment button you can selectively decide which colors you want to desaturate or saturate.  With a simple click and drag you take control of the final outcome of an image. 

—Melissa Macatee
Contributing Blogger

Tip of the Day: Will your processing stand the test of time?

Natalie Norton recently did a great tutorial on Editing Eyes as a guest on Digital Photography School.  It is a nice tutorial showing you steps to use in Photoshop to make your subject’s eyes have a little pop. What caught my attention was Natalie Norton’s comment that she tries to consider during her post processing if the effect she applies to her photos will still look good in ten years. If she thinks it might be too much, she pulls back.If your intent is to create a unique, processed image, then go ahead editing with no limits.  Digital photography has brought many to the computer to edit their images. Often photographs intended to be traditional become over processed, so take the time to consider whether it will look when you come across the photo in the future. A strong image will stand on its own without being over processed. 

—Melissa Macatee
Contributing Blogger

Jill Greenberg vs. John McCain

Photographer Jill Greenberg is no stranger to controversy. After all, she’s literally taken candy from babies in order to get her shot in the past. So the latest uproar surrounding her photos of John McCain for The Atlantic magazine’s October cover doesn’t come as much of a surprise, especially in light of her controversial anti-George Bush photographs. The photos of McCain for the magazine’s cover were lit from below with a harsh (and very unflattering) strobe light. What is surprising is the pointedly unprofessional manner that she conducted the photo shoot (reportedly boasting afterwards about tricking McCain into posing for in an unbecoming manner). The photos used by the magazine, likely wouldn’t have caused much backlash; it’s the Photoshopped versions of the outtakes that she posted on her personal site that has the magazine apologizing to the McCain camp.

The mess doesn’t bode well for Greenberg or The Atlantic, but does the magazine really have a case against the photographer after the fact? They claim that they don’t vet photographers for their political agenda (which normally would have nothing to do with their performance). Still, they printed one of Greenberg’s photos on their cover (one that although a far cry from the doctored images, still isn’t that flattering) and only after the uproar about the images on her personal site are they rumored to be considering both not paying Greenberg as well as a lawsuit against her. Click here for the editors’ note from The Atlantic about the cover.
(image via. Gawker.com)
—Kathleen Davis
Assistant Editor

Lexar’s new UDMA card is big and fast. Just like we like them.

I’ve got a secret to share: for the past month, my CF card of choice has been an early production sample of Lexar’s new Professional UDMA 300x 16BG CompactFlash card. It’s so hot off the press that it was shipped to me before the labels were finished being printed! Instead of the usual Lexar branding you’ll see on the shelves, my version of this card is bare metal with a Brother P-Touch Label stating simply Lexar 16GB 300x. Labels schmabels—so long as it works!

 

And indeed it works. After a dry run to ensure read-write-rewrite functions (fire off a few frames, dump to computer via Lexar FW800 UDMA card reader, trash DCIM folder, repeat), I threw this little chunk of big, fast solid-state memory into any and every CF-based camera I happened to be using, including 2 UDMA-speed cameras, the Nikon D3 and Olympus E-3 and fired away.

I’ve shot RAW+JPEG HDR bursts with the Nikon D3, the US Open with the Olympus E-3, and my vacation to Bermuda with the Canon 1D Mark III with no field failures and no transferred data corruptions to report. It’s big—it’ll hold hundreds of RAW files from just about every DSLR, and it’s UDMA-fast, so it’ll never be the bottleneck with any of today’s cameras. And if you’ve got a Firewire 800 port on your computer, you should be able to dump the full 16GBs of digital images to your desktop in just under eight minutes.

 

Big, fast, and worry-free—that’s how we like our memory. So we can forget about it and concentrate on making photos.

 

The new Lexar 16GB card will be available later this month. We're waiting for pricing info and will update ASAP.

For more on UDMA and card speed ratings, check out Speed Racers.

 

 

 

Tip of the Day: 10 Free Web-based Alternatives to Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the tool of choice for many photographers. But if you aren’t ready to drop the big bucks, or want a way to edit your images when you’re away from your home computer, look in to one of these 10 web-based image editors, complied by lifeclever.com The best part? All have free elements.

Check out the complete list here.

Hands on Review: Alien Skin Image Doctor 2

Alien Skin’s Image Doctor 2, ($200, direct) is an easy-to-use plug-in for making simple corrections to common photographic problems. The program offers five basic operations:

Dust and Scratch Remover
What it does: Removes both small and large objects, as well as scratches in background of images. 
How it worked: Removing large objects from simple backgrounds was easy. With more complex images, I was less successful— the area to be removed became a big mishmash of other things in the photo. 

Blemish Concealer
What it does: Easily removes, moles, acne, stains and simple wrinkles.
How it worked: Don’t expect to erase years from a face, the concealer tends to blur the area of the wrinkle. You can adjust the intensity of the strength of the correction, but too much becomes a problem, so it’s best to stick with simple fixes in smaller areas.

JPEG Repair
What it does: Can minimize digital noise or add grain to give your images a more film-like feel.
How it worked:  I ran some images with digital noise through and didn’t see obvious results.  In general most of the jpeg repairs result from a blurring of the image.  This is a good feature to use with older, damaged photos.

Skin smoother
What it does: Works well to minimize wrinkles or rough skin by adjusting the amount of smoothing. 
How it worked: Use the preview window on an enlarged section to get the best results. 

Smart Fill
What it does: For simple fill situations such as a picture rotated and then cropped with a small area left blank, this option filled in the area perfectly.
How it worked: No need to clone to fill the space, which saved time, this feature would also work with photos that have been damaged.

Image Doctor 2 works with Adobe Photoshop CS2 or later, Elements 4(Macintosh) or later, Elements 5 (Windows) or later, Corel Paint Pro Photo X2, or Adobe Fireworks CS3 (live effects not supported).

—Melissa Macatee
Contributing Blogger

What Celebrities Would Look like If They Weren’t Famous

Sure, Photoshop can make you look young and thin. But it’s more fun when image-editing skills are used for evil instead of good. Which is why we got such a kick out of this collection called “If Celebs Moved to Oklahoma” complied from Planethiltron.com

Here are two of our favorites: Alternate versions of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen and Michael Douglas & Catherine Zeta Jones.

Tip of the Day: The Black-and-White of Retouching

With a digital portrait that I want to retouch in software, I’ve discovered the best way to evaluate my subject’s complexion is to view the portrait in black-and-white. Now, my final step in touching up a portrait is to open Adobe Photoshop’s Channels palette, and evaluate just the Green channel. This monochrome version boldly highlights any blemishes or wrinkles I may have missed.

—Reader Tip from Trudy Zeitsinger, Portland, ME

Picnik teams up the Flickr

Picnik, the cool online image-editing program we test drove a few months back, has integrated its image-editing tools directly onto Flickr.

You can still upload your Flickr photos (or photos from various other sites) on the Picnik site, but now even if you don’t have a Picnik account, you can make changes to your shots right on Flickr.

Simply click the “edit photo” button, and you get all the basic Picnik editing choices without leaving Flickr. Pretty cool.

—Kathleen Davis
Assistant Editor