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The Photoshop Blog offers the latest Photoshop news and software updates, Photoshop tips and tutorials, and random thoughts from graphic artist and Photoshop expert Jennifer Apple.



Practical Artistry: Light and Exposure for Digital Photographers - Plus Sample Chapter
May 20, 2008

I've been looking through a nice little digital photography book and I like it very much. Practical Artistry: Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers offers clear and concise instructions on how to achieve results for a variety of planned shots. I took my new Nikon D80 and my VR 18-200 lens (love this combo!) and the book to the airport on a very overcast evening and tried some of the suggested settings for what I was shooting (approach and touchdown), and I also referenced it for some shots of shadows cast by my garden ferns (photos below). The info proved to be very helpful.





Here's some promo on the book: This beautifully illustrated book teaches you how to apply the techniques and principles of classic photography so you can make great images with today's digital equipment.

With a focus on light and exposure, two crucial concepts you need to understand and master if you are to truly capture the images you see, author and renowned fine art photographer Harold Davis presents his own images as examples and inspiration.

Topics covered in this book include:

• Camera, lenses, and equipment
• Understanding exposure and measuring light
• Relationship of aperture to shutter speed and ISO
• Working with depth of field
• Natural lighting, studio lighting, and the use of flash
• Light and color temperature
• Working with white balance
• Photographing at dawn or dusk
• Photography at night
• Capturing motion
• Telling a story with your image
• Capturing people, places, and things
• Setting up a digital workflow
• RAW processing and double RAW processing
• Adjusting exposure and reducing noise
• Black & white photography

Concise and to the point, Practical Artistry clearly demonstrates that photography, essentially, is writing with light, and that the type of images you produce depend on the many choices you have for using that skill. Harold Davis gives you an array of choices in full living color.

Sample Chapter
You can download Chapter 4: ISO and Noise (PDF format) at the O'Reilly site. From the intro:

Photographers coming to digital from film are astounded at digital’s powerful and flexible ability to “dial in” light sensitivity (called ISO). With a film camera, you are limited by the sensitivity to light of the film in the camera. Not so with digital!

It seems that it should be possible to tell a digital camera how sensitive to light its sensor should be by setting a menu item or twisting a dial. In fact, using a higher ISO doesn’t actually increase a sensor’s inherent sensitivity to light. When you increase the ISO, you are amplifying the signal captured by the sensor. All captures are subject to some noise related to heat created by the sensor and the theoretical limitations of electronic circuitry. Amplifying the signal increases the baseline noise present in all photos.

So what, exactly, is noise? As a general matter, from the viewpoint of information theory as applied to computing and communications, noise is data not used to transmit a signal. In other words, digital noise is simply an inherent (and unwanted) effect.

With film, the higher the sensitivity rating of the film, the more “grain”—visible particles that are residues of the silver halide chemistry that makes film sensitive to light. With digital, as sensitivity is increased, noise (rather than grain) also increases. Some think that noise lacks the aesthetic quality of grain, important to many analog photographic prints. The quality of noise does vary from camera to camera, with some equipment producing more “grain-like” noise than others. Noise comes from many sources other than increasing the light sensitivity setting (see sidebar). The most important factors that increase noise (and are to some degree controlled by the photographer) are the sensitivity setting (ISO) used, whether a long exposure time is involved, and the exposure settings used when photographing with very bright light sources.

Download Chapter 4: ISO and Noise

About the Author
Harold Davis is an author, photographer, and expert technologist. Harold's photographs have been widely published, exhibited, and collected. Many of Harold's fine art photography posters are well known, including some recent alternatively processed digital flower images published by New York Graphic Society.

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SiteGrinder Photoshop Plugin - Create Websites Instantly

There often seems to be a strict division of labor within the world of web design and development. Creative professionals tend to stick to the Photoshop domain, while those well-versed in scripting are left to the task of implementing their work. Indeed, the two realms are quite different from each other, to which any of us even vaguely familiar with either can easily attest.

Essentially, Photoshop is a no-holds-barred design studio, offering the artist a seemingly endless array of creative options. On the other hand, HTML, CSS, Java and the like follow strict rules of engagement, requiring the developer to take any number of esoteric concerns into consideration in order to ensure that designs are properly displayed on the web.

Turn Photoshop Into A Complete Web Design Tool
SiteGrinder seeks to bridge this gap between design and development. Basically, this program turns Photoshop into an easy-to-use and fully functional web design tool. With SiteGrinder, designers will now have the freedom to totally let their creativity loose and then, without skipping a beat, transfer their designs to the web. Bringing esthetic concerns together with more practical considerations, this program is an amazingly powerful tool that would make a fantastic addition to any web designer's bag of tricks.

Generate Your Web Pages Directly From Photoshop
By generating web pages directly from Photoshop, you'll be able to spend much more time on the creative end of the spectrum, since you'll know right off the bat how well particular designs will translate to the web. No more going back to the Photoshop drawing board after getting a phone call from your development team, telling you that what you had envisioned doesn't have a chance of being displayed on the web. You can immediately visually and interactively test your designs, which permits you to then make changes to either esthetics or functions while it's still relatively early on in the design process.

Pricing and Availability
Mac OS X and Windows versions of the SiteGrinder unlockable demo are available now via download. SiteGrinder can be ordered from Media Lab's online store.

Photoshop CS3 Upgrade Options And Bundles From The Adobe Store

Photoshop CS3 Extended is ideal for film, video, and multimedia pros and for graphic and web designers using 3D and motion. Get the full version for US $999, or upgrade for US $349. The standard version of Photoshop CS3 is available for US $649, or as an upgrade for US $199. See all upgrade options at the Adobe Store. See our CS3 Resource Center for free Photoshop CS3 tutorials.

Photoshop Extended is also available as part of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium, which combines all-new CS3 versions of Photoshop, Flash Pro, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat 8 Pro. Upgrade options for customers in Europe, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Asia can be found at the Adobe International Store.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Available At The Adobe Store

There are tons of new features in Adobe Lightroom 1.0 that you won't find in the beta version. From Clone and Healing functionality to metadata browsing, you'll be able to free-up post-processing time like never before. Get it now at the Adobe Store. Customers in Europe, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Asia can find special pricing and offers at the Adobe International Store. For free Lightroom tutorials see our Lightroom tutorials page.

Photoshop Masking Plugin Fluid Mask 3 - $15 Discount Special

The 4 1/2 out of 5 star review of Fluid Mask 3 at MacWorld begins by saying that this "Photoshop plug-in takes the pain out of extracting backgrounds," and goes on to recommend the latest version, stating that "Fluid Mask 3.0.2 is a very effective tool for separating objects from their backgrounds. It offers a variety of useful features for tackling almost any difficult image, from wispy hair to complex foliage. Online video tutorials and live training sessions help ease the learning curve."

Our friends at Vertus, the makers of Fluid Mask 3 Photoshop Plugin, have set up a special exclusive discount for PhotoshopSupport.com. Just follow this discount link and instantly get $15 off your purchase of Fluid Mask 3.

Fluid Mask 3 is designed for photographers, image editors, graphic designers and all those who take digital image editing seriously. In a streamlined interface and workflow, Fluid Mask 3 instantly shows key edges in the image and provides comprehensive easy to use tools that work with difficult-to-see edges and tricky areas like trees & lattices. Features include: