"Project: Photoshop and Lightroom reaffirms Adobe's commitment to photography and photographic education," said Julieanne Kost, senior evangelist at Adobe. "This program enables students and educators to experience the Lightroom beta first hand, get in-depth training on Photoshop as well as serve as a conduit from which they can freely share their work, ideas and tips through a dynamic online community."

There will be a two-day seminar at each venue with world-renowned documentary photographer and four-time Picture of the Year Award winner Colin Finlay taking participants under his wing. He will share some tidbits of his career as a photographer, while Julianne Kost will take the wheel on the second day, briefing students on how to use Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe Lightroom beta. A selected group of students will be chosen to join Finlay in a workshop assignment. Students will place images from this assignment into a portfolio which will be uploaded to the Web site for sharing with the extended community.

Adobe Lightroom, available in public beta for both Windows® and Macintosh platforms.

Schedule:

Sept. 5-6, Lansing Community College, Lansing, Mich.
Sept. 7-8, Tyler Junior College, Tyler, Texas Sept. 11-12, Santa Monica College, Santa Monica, Calif.
Sept. 13-14, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, Calif.
Sept. 15-16, Brooks Institute of Photography, Santa Barbara, Calif.
Sept. 18-19, Academy of Art University, San Francisco, Calif.
Sept. 20-21, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, Calif.
Sept. 26-27, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, N.Y.
Sept. 28-29, Syracuse University, The Newhouse School of Communications, Syracuse, N.Y.
Oct. 5-6, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, Ill.
Oct. 9-10, Antonelli Institute, near Philadelphia, Pa.
Oct 11-12, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, N.M.
Oct. 16-17, Art Institute of Colorado, Denver, Colo.
Oct. 18-19, Brigham Young University, Salt Lake City, Utah Oct 23-24, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York City, N.Y.
Oct. 27, New York University Tisch School of the Arts, New York City, N.Y.
Oct. 28, Parsons - The New School for Design, New York City, N.Y.
Nov. 6-7, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Ga.
Nov 15-16, Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, Fl.
Nov. 27-28, New England School of Photography, Boston, Mass.
Nov. 29-30, Hallmark Institute of Photography, Turner's Falls, Mass.
Dec 4 - 5, Art Institute of Seattle, Seattle, Wash.
Dec 7 - 8, School of Visual Arts, New York City, New York

So here's the situation.

Your really hot pen-pal in Europe has finally sent his or her picture to you and is now asking you to send one of your own as well. Knowing that that old prom pic just won't do, you take your digicam and pose as only a model would, then you download all the shots into your computer. Just as you were about to send off those pictures, something catches your eye: the lack of a hairline.

In the words of Douglas Adams: Don't Panic!

That's because David Nigel has prepared a step-by-step tutorial to help those in a... not-so-hairy situation. By creating a simple custom brush in Photoshop 7, which is pretty much composed of a few squiggly lines, one can create convincing hair and fur effects for those emergency touch-ups. He has also included directions and tips on how to blend the effect with your photo to make it look as convincing and as real as possible.

So, with that problem out of the way, things should be fine. Well, at least until the time that you and your pen-pal decide to meet up, that is.

Click on Read for the step-by-step procedures.

DJ Ron, or Ron Slomowicz, has been spinning on Vanderbilt University radio station WRVU for over a decade. This talented DJ has compiled these hilariously, funny photographs on his website.

You have probably seen these pictures in one of the SPAM emails that's in your inbox or trash right now depending on your mood. Some of them are quite amusing, like my favorite Panda Kiss, and some just ho-hum. I can't go into details on how these photos effects were achieved because their origin is unknown. But what we do know is that there are a lot of bored graphics artists out there.

Sydney Harbour is renowned not only for the Sydney Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge, but also for its panoramic night view. No wonder tons of photos and images of that particular area keep popping up on the net. Let's face it, though - not everyone is good at taking pictures. It's difficult to cram something so grand and majestic in one single shot. This is why Scott Howard put together 170 images taken with a Canon 10D and a Canon 100-400L lens. The result? An awesome 715 megapixel (40,000 x 18,000) photo of Sydney Harbor at night.

Most of the photos were taken using 400mm, with some "fill" shots (e.g. sky in the top left corner) taken at around 200mm. All photos are at ISO 200, 6 seconds, f/6.7 in manual mode. All the office buildings are taken at least 1200 meters (about 1300 yards) away from the camera. The Harbour Bridge shot was taken about half of that distance. When zoomed in, the image is made up of 14,729 .jpg files, each about 5 to 15kb in size. The original image is a 1.3GB Photoshop file.

Check out Scott Howard's photography site and play around with the picture. You can zoom in, zoom out, move it left, right, up, and down. It's fun and it's breathtaking.

If I am to make a list of the things I love the most, these two will definitely make the top ten - Summer and Anime. First, who hates summer?! No homeworks to tackle, no class bully to avoid, and no worries of staying up late because you have to wake up early tomorrow for class; the only downside is, boredom. On the other hand, who doesn't love Animes?! Don't go telling me it's kid stuff, I used to handle a column space and most of the quotes I used were from animes, like Kira Yamato's (Google him) "If we don't do anything just because we think it won't do something, then we just did worse than nothing". The downside, you can only enjoy them so much.

So what can we do with these downsides? Well, try to find a way to hit 'em two birds with one stone; use the spare time (spare equates boring) to learn something that can expand your love for animes, like this neat trick using Adobe Photoshop (provided by the good people over at TutorialDash). What we have here is a set of steps to make a real thing appear it's taken right from the frames of an anime episode. Talk about doing things in reverse right? (Anime creators stive hard to make their work realistic, and here we are trying to make real things look, well, anime-istic.)

The steps await after the jump!

I'm pretty sure you've heard a lot of celebrities say not to believe the photos that you see in the magazines because they aren't real. There's some truth into that and with Mizuno's Photoshop tutorial you'll see why.

Before

Step 1


Use the Heal Brush tool  to remove any obvious marks or blemish. A small sized brush would be advisable so as to brush away the blemishes without losing any important detail.

Read full article after the jump!

This is an attempt by photoshop/4106" id="tag" title="">Dr. Photoshop to recreate the default wallpaper for Mac OS X called Aqua Blue. It will help if you have the original picture of the Mac wallie in front of you as you work for real time comparison. It may not be much but it is something to call your own. Just add your own touch to this wallpaper classic.

1. Create a new document that is double the size for your intended project. In this example it is 5000 pixels x 5000 pixels. Use #0A5FAF as a fill for the background.
2. Create a new layer.
3. Expand the window making a large margin outside the document canvas.
4. Using the pen tool, make a curve that starts outside the document and ends outside of it as well.
5. Right click or Ctrl Click on the pen path and fill the path with white or #FFFFFF.
6. Apply a stroke effect of about 1 to 5 px depending on the size of the document.
7. Adjust the fill to about 10-30%
8. Repeat Steps 2-7 a couple of times.
9. Duplicate each layer for safety measure. Just hide the original so no changes will take effect on it. Also, so you won't have to re-do every layer in case you make a mistake.
10. Apply a mask to the newly rasterized layer (you can find the button in the bottom of the layer palette). Take the gradient tool and set it to black to white and blending mode darken. On the layer mask, apply gradients by clicking and dragging. By setting the blending mode to darken, you can apply the gradient multiple times and it will not undo the region masked region created on the gradient you dragged out just before. This would not be true if it were normal. You want to leave the center and the middle of the stroke mostly intact and hide the ends and sections not close the the line.

Download: [How to Video]

So here we have a nice looking shot of a Chicago train station.  The colors are good.  Lighting is pleasing enough.  There's nothing that really stands out here, but in general, it's a pleasing enough image to look at, right?  Start to read about the image though, and you'll find out that it represents around 2,000 hours of work, 15,000 layers in Photoshop, and a quarter million paths that create the shapes.  The file is 1.7 gigabytes in size!

The artist rendered this image from an actual photograph over the past eleven months.  I really don't know what else to say about this.  It's jaw-dropping.  As a photo, it's fine.  But as a complete digital rendering, it's an unbelievable thing to behold.

"Seeing is believing" has been slapped-down hard by the digital age of imaging.  Pro tools such as Photoshop allow a halfway decent user to create images that most people would accept at face value.  The real professionals can even make the most skeptical people wonder, "is it or isn't it?" 

Well here are a few great examples of how it's done. 
- Creating product shots
A nice and relatively simple tutorial that just about anyone can follow along with in Photoshop.
- Coca-Cola ad creation
This is a flash animation (click the flashing button toward the bottom to start it) that shows where all the image elements came from, and how they were put together to create the final product.  Pretty much a 'wow' inducing clip.
- Portfolio of Before & After Shots
Roll your mouse over the shots to see how the original images looked, compared the final product.  Those women in the Victoria's Secret catalogs?  They don't look THAT good.  Sorry to spoil all those fantasies guys.

After seeing some of these things, you may be able to start picking out what's real and what's not in a picture.  There may be an oddly blown-out skin tone, or sizing that doesn't quite fit.  Most likely you won't catch them often, but now and then they're there.

There's something about film photography that (in my approximation) will never be duplicated by its digital counterpart.  The way the film is manufactured, handled, processed just gives the photographs that were conceived upon it a unique feel and look.  One of those looks that I like in certain shots is a graininess. 

Digital photos may have a similar result in the form of noise (small colored-dots amongst the details of a shot) but it's not the same as a grainy looking film-produced shot.  Luckily, we've got wonderful tools to easily make our shots look and feel just about however we'd like.  (The debate of post processing/photoshopping is one I will be delving into very soon.)  Linked below is a terrific little how-to for adding a film-grain element to your digital photos.  It focuses on black and white pictures, but it should work ok with desaturated color shots as well.