I have been pretty busy these past few weeks, but wanted to ensure I didn’t forget about mentioning PhotoshopWorld, which will be in Las Vegas this September (4-6). I know you can still purchase tickets and would be awesome to meet up with some people.
If you do attend, be sure to stop by the PhotoshopCafe booth and say hi.
I will be sure to write up a post-photoshopworld overview once I get back from the conference. If all goes well, I will also have video and photos from the show floor for people that can’t make it.
The Nikon Coolpix Digital Field Guide
is a wonderful companion for any Nikon Coolpix camera owner. In just a few minutes of reading I learned about settings on my camera that I didn’t even know existed. I liked the fact that in Chapter 1 the author compared various Coolpix cameras and I am sure others would think this could be annoying since you already own one. However I on the other hand found it nice to know what else was available. This book is so in depth the author even takes you through each screen and menu while explaining what they all do. This chapter alone proved to be more useful to me than the entire manual that came with the camera. Call me crazy, but being a photographer I prefer visual learning over long paragraphs of text.
No book about photography should be without a guide on composition and this book is no exception, the author explains the various rules you as the photographer should follow and adapt to. To me chapter 6 goes right along with the composition steps to include overall best practices of photography. Of course now that you have shot all these great photos it is safe to say you want them on your computer, well if that is the case than chapter 7 has all the information you need. The book ends off with a glossary of common photography terms that you will hear in various shooting locations.
Overall I have found this book to be very beneficial for not only Nikon Coolpix owners, but any photographers. You can take the concepts thoroughly explained within this book and adapt them to your own shooting habits, which in the end will make you a better photographer. I highly recommend this book and already have to my friends.
I have been working with the scripting in Photoshop CS3 a little more and quickly found some very useful resources and tools.
First in the list of useful resources is the scripting listener which can be found in “Scripting Guide/Utilities/”. In order to make this work you drag the “ScriptingListener.plugin” into the “Plug-Ins” directory and restart Photoshop. Once the listener is installed and restarted you are ready to start script watching.
Photoshop will spit out a log file (named “ScriptingListenerJS.log” on the Mac) to your desktop. Here is a sampling of what that listener returns
var id1 = charIDToTypeID( "Opn " );
var desc1 = new ActionDescriptor();
var id2 = charIDToTypeID( "null" );
desc1.putPath( id2, new File( "/Users/mkeefe/Desktop/Picture 4.png" ) );
executeAction( id1, desc1, DialogModes.NO )
Basically what that does is opens an image “Picture 4.png”on my Desktop. Of course at first glance you are probably scratching your head, but don’t be alarmed it is fairly simple to understand.
Lets go through it line by line.
Line 1: setup character id of “Opn ” which is “Open”
Line 2: set an action for photoshop to reference
Line 3: make a path reference for the file we want to open
Line 4: Last but not least, we actually call the desired action passing in the variables we set in the last few lines.
I will be writing up some more in depth articles on scriptplayground.com once I get some more free time.
Thanks to Jeff Tranberry and Thomas Ruark for answering my list of questions at PhotoshopWorld. In fact Jeff is hte one that alerted me to this scripting listener at his “Photoshop for Geeks” session at PhotoshopWorld Boston.
In the next part I will explain the “Object Library” browser.
Yesterday PhotoshopCafe announced the finalists from the Design Challenge. To help promote the contetst I developed a little Flash app that sites atop the forum which randomly displays an entry. The user can rollOver the image and an overlay is displayed showing who created that piece.
The winners are to be announced soon and I will post back when they are.
The Photoshop family has a new addition. Earlier this year Photoshop Lightroom was released after being in public beta, which I was a part of.
Now Adobe has announced an “Extended” version of Photoshop.
Render and incorporate 3D images into your 2D composites. Stop time with easy editing of motion graphics on video layers. And probe your images with measurement, analysis, and visualization tools.
Not too many details at the moment as this is very new, but either way it looks very promising.
