Do you miss blue skies?

So the weather has been pretty bad recently, for yonks infact. The constant drizzle was starting to get me down, but then I realised there's a place you can go for your blue sky fix!

Estate agents! Adding (badly in most cases) in blue skies in seems to be contagious! Buy any of these houses and it's sure not to rain.

Now what I really like is that in several picture you can still see puddles, presumably they cloned out each rain drop from the still.

If you've found any terrible Photoshop work that upsets you please share! 

For a slightly more realistic view, here's a picture from a dog walk a few weeks back.

Way to busy to blog... So here is a funny link.

So we've recently moved into our new hours - so photography has sadly taken a bit of a back seat while I do the DIY/Garden.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/never-ask-the-internet-for-photoshop-help

But came across this link on Facebook today - very funny. Photoshop used for evil does make me giggle uncontrollably, it also reminds me of a poster campaign I ran at uni of my fellow housemate.

Wedding Invites, a how to.

Right, for anyone who doesn't know me and B are engaged and we're planning to do most of the work ourselves, starting with the invites... which transpired to be incredibly easy!

We looked at few we've had in the past, pinched the bits we liked... we knew we wanted them simple/clear to read with not too much manual work.

I started by buying the card, I bought these they come in a box of 100 and with envelopes, making a nice square shape of 135*135mm. Once you know what shape card you have you can do the design, if you do the design before the card you might need to shop around for something more expensive.

I then went to 1001FreeFonts and picked a font to use, we're trying to have a simple theme so an old fashioned typewriter font suited: Here it is (be sure to check the licence, most are free to use for non-commercial use).

 

 As I mentioned, the card was 135*135 Square meaning designs are 270*135. I find the best way to do this is to create a layer ½ the size and place it on the left, this allows you to picture it as two halfs... front and back.

Throw the text on that you want, line it up so it looks nice.

Do the back, here we've done all the boring details like accommodation and the wedding list.

Mirror this for the inside too, here we've left the left side clear so we can stick in an A4 map to unfold nicely.

Don't make more work for yourself, for the evening invitation I've use the first as a template and only made slight changes to the text content.

It doesn't have to stop there, in Photoshop it's very easy to do a mail-merge like function. It's called variables, it's designed for much higher processing like mass production of web banners based on changing information in excel sheets. But it works just as well to produce invite with individual printed names... you need is a .csv file with a list of names in (as pictured above).

The finished product:

Run through the printer twice (once each side, with a long wait for the ink to dry).

The envelopes had a standard mail merge used, it was a bit of a faff to set the paper size correctly in word, but it did work in the end. For people with a whole address that got printed, most people are getting theirs hand delivered so it's just a name. We also used a rubber stamp to put a return address on the back, but that was mostly because I could.

I've skipped over any of the details, assuming you know how to do these. there are plenty of good lessons for Photoshop on you-tube, just search for what you're after. Good phrases are "Photoshop Text Wrap" and "Photoshop Variables".

While Photoshop is wonderful to use, you could basically achieve the same results in publisher, paint, power-point or gimp. For simple text layout work there are other applications which do the job just as well... meaning you can really do it yourself and save a few hundred pounds.

Honestly, there are companies out there charging a fortune for what's basically GCSE level DT work which can be done on equipment most people have at home already. End of rant.

How to make a silhouette

OK really simple post, normally I just Google image search for a silhouette when I'm after one. For example we recently had a murder mystery night for which I made the place names:

Now these were really easy and Google images returned great samples to use, but it's really easy to turn a standard image to a silhouette... and here's how.

1. Open a stock image, remember you'll loose detail so you want one where the shape is clearly defined.

2. Select around the image - here I've just used a combination of the magic wand + select tool to remove the background. You don't need to remove the background but it's easier to see whats going on.

3. With the selection in place, get the brush tool out set it massive + black, paint and you're done.

The feet were a little tricky because the bird was on a branch, but you can edit that however you like. You don't need to use Photoshop, but the layers make it easy.

But should you want a pigeon silhouette, feel free to use this one

p.s. Not that I'm condoning this, but if somebody had water marked a stock silhouette this also works very well to remove a watermark, as you select the shape and just fill it in yourself.

Photoshop CS6 a hash of a review.

So I've been contemplating the upgrade to CS6... there is even a free 30day trial from adobe.

So 17 days left, and will I purchase it? Given it's just shy of a grand? No.

Don't get me wrong, it's very pretty, a vast improvement from any before... but it's key thing seems to be it can crop and straighten pictures for you at the same time:

All you do is draw a crop line, like the ruler tool then it rotates and crops to fit.

But to be honest, anyone who could use the ruler tool and arbitrary rotate could do this in previous versions.

However, the functionality of the RAW image processing is amazing, you can even do bulk lens correction it picks out the lens automatically, and you just tick a box. This seems to do an amazing job on the lenses I've tired it on. And it works on .CR2 files by default, which is the file type newer canons kick out.

The other big change I've noticed is under the photo merge and HDR - the HDR is MUCH better and aligns images will even if taken by hand.

But if anything with all these settings it seems to do a worse job of merging! But it is quicker, probably because of the 64bit architecture, allowing it to use a lot more RAM.

So yes, generally prettier than earlier models, 64bit, nice Raw functions, HDR improvement and probably other things I haven't noticed. But £1000, honestly? B would kill me and I'd rather get a 16-35mm F2.8 L and use gimp.

There are a few things you can do to bring down the cost, upgrade prices are lower (about 60% lower) and I think you can buy from the American page - which basically has the same price but different currency... given it's currently (31/05/2012) 1 British pound = 1.5485 U.S. dollars that's a massive saving.

But still no, for now.