Ps Weekly

Good Morning All!

(And by “all” I mean my wife because I do get at least one page view when I do these things.)

Another Fun’tastic issue of Photoshop User magazine, the flagship pub of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP), went to press last Friday! This issue was a little less painful than the last issue (which was a whoppin’ 156 pages). The Production department, under the astute leadership of our Creative Director, Felix “FlippyHand” Nelson, pushed out another issue with another redesign. We tried a few new things here and there, but in the end we’re all happy with what we sent last Friday. In case I hadn’t mentioned it before, I do the managing editor stuff for PSU…yes, I am a lucky SOB…I mean uhh: blessed now that you mention it (:

THANK YOU LESA

There’s something that contributors do that drive me (and the other editors) insane. Some debate what it’s called, but whatever you want to call it, it makes images look like [poop]. When our writers take screen captures to accompany their tutorials, if they don’t have Font Smoothing set to “Best for CRT” in the Appearance section of System Preferences, the letters have colorized halos around the edges. We can’t print those because they’ll come out squishy/smudgy looking. Nine times out of 10, we’ll just re-create the conditions in Photoshop and retake the screen capture. This is time consuming and sometimes impossible. Here’s where Lesa Snider-King, Photoshop World instructor and iStockphoto evangelist, comes to the rescue. On Lesa’s blog the other day, she showed us an example of color-aliasing/artifacting in a photo she took, and how to fix it! It takes a little tweaking of her technique to work on screen captures, but here goes:

Step 1: Open the troubled image and press Command-J (PC: Ctrl-J).

Step 2: Go under the Filter menu and choose Blur>Gaussian Blur. The radius of pixels will vary depending on the resolution of your image but so far it seems that 1.5 to 2.0 with a 72 ppi resolution image will do the trick.

Step 3: Right after clicking OK to close the Gaussian Blur filter dialog, go under the Edit menu, and pick Fade. Or use the keyboard shortcut, Shift-Command-F (PC: Shift-Ctrl-F). Lower the Opacity to about 90% (pretty much anywhere between 80% and 95% seems to work), choose Color from the Blend Mode menu, and click OK to close the dialog.

Step 4: Click on the Layers panel flyout menu icon and pick Flatten Image from the list (or select Flatten Image from the Layer menu).

Step 5: Enjoy!

I’m dealing with some of the same hurdles that kept me from blogging in the past—technology. In the sea of webpages I swim through in a day, I see lots of things that I’d like to incorporate here, but I guess I’ve gotta walk before I run…and keep posting!

In the news:

Scott Kelby’s back here at the shop from Dubai and he gives us some serious training by experience on his blog. Word to the wise: think about what that camera bag is going to feel like after a humping it across the desert for awhile (or anywhere for that matter).

The killer Web Team here at Kelby Media gave our flagship website, www.photoshopuser.com, a serious tuneup, which launched yesterday. It looks fan-freakin’-tastic too! Much easier to find everything and it’s incredibly seamless compared to the old design. Now maybe I can talk them into making this blog look a little less atrocious…if only something could be done about the writing (:

The folks over at Revsion3—who host one of our legendary contributor’s shows, Bert Monroy’s “Pixel Perfect,” and digg.com, and diggnation, and…—have too much time on their hands (and apparently just enough booze). They did an insane lip sync to an old INXS tune! You’ll be digging around for old tapes in no time…or hitting up iTunes for the right “INXS Greatest Hits” release (have fun trying to decide!)

Well, I think that’s an ample smattering of weirdness for today. See you soon (:

Tomorrow is the first day that I’m (supposed) to report on the bits/technutz from all-things-Photoshop that have happened this week, but I’ve yet to get the Blogroll squared-away. The good news is, I’ve finally navigated (circumvented) the technology that’s been standing between me and posting on the blog, so we’re not far away. A NAPP member from Sweden(!), Erik B., has volunteered to help me get the blog functioning and looking the way I want it (like posting Photoshop World Orlando pics and so on). So NEXT Friday is a bit more reasonable…see you then (:

Hello, and welcome to the PsWeekly blog! I guess this is where I’m supposed to give my mission statement and all that, right? Well, I figured the best way to learn about using Photoshop for Web stuff was to get out there and do it. This site should be considered "Under Construction" for now.

Thanks for stopping by! I’ll get some images and other cool stuff up here soon.

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