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July 31, 2008
[ OLD DOGS AND NEW TRICKS ]
THERE ARE SOME PEOPLE WE HAVE HEARD OF who claim to know the meaning of E=MC2 Unfortunately we don’t know enough to be able to tell if this is an idle boast. There are also a few persons who skite about their comprehensive understanding of the working of Adobe Photoshop. We do know enough about this subject to take their bragging with a grain of salt.
Photoshop is an intimidating piece of software. After using it in its various incarnations for the past ten years we admit to still skating around on the surface. And that, frankly, is not good enough. We needed to brace ourselves and get to grips with this astonishing industry standard application.
So we enrolled for the Adobe online eSeminars for Photoshop users. (www.adobeeseminars.com.au) Each seminar last 60 minutes. They are free.
Adobe has assembled a cast of eTeachers, made up of talented photographers from Australia and New Zealand. You will need a broadband connection to take part because they are streamed “live”. Past seminars are also available at tinyurl.com/5cp9vo, but they are also streaming, so they must be watched in real time.
Things don’t always go smoothly with these narrowcasts. There are occasional sound and image dropouts and, inexplicably, the foul-ups are preserved in the stored versions. And you can’t fast forward through the bad bits. However, this is a small price to pay for the usefulness of the online seminar form.
There is another, more serious, drawback with this style of teaching. The presenters do things very quickly, making it difficult to grasp the concept being demonstrated and then being able to replicate it later. Last week the teacher showed a nifty way of getting a photo of a busy intersection in which the final image has no cars or people in sight. To follow his rapid fire demonstration you needed to know about Stack, Auto Align, Smart Objects and Median. Oh dear, back to “Photoshop for Dummies”.
Still, even though the teaching style leaves something to be desired, these seminars are an eye opener for those of us who have hitherto scratched the surface of Photoshop. The demonstration of digitally creating a group photograph from two images so that the dopey expressions in one are replaced with the beatific smiles in another was a revelation.
There were only 55 participants in last week’s eSeminar. You can’t interrupt the teacher while he’s in full flow but you can post questions as the session proceeds, which the presenter answers at the end. It’s a sort of delayed interaction.
However, if you’re the sort of person who prefers learning from a book, twe came across a beauty in the newsagent last week. It is in the Focus Photoshop Guide series and the current issue is “The complete guide to perfect portraits”, with attached CD-ROM.
The digital camera is a merciless recording device and, frankly, most of us have a few warts, wrinkles and pimples we would rather not have preserved for posterity in the family photo album. And some of us can benefit from a bit of glamorous fogging of the facial features. Now, for $20, you can find out how the pros make their models look gorgeous, even on bad hair days.
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Posted by terry at July 31, 2008 02:44 AM
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