Ps Weekly

Heya Folks!

I hope you’re doing well. It’s just another day in paradise here and, on top of that, today begins the first day of my family’s favorite month: October! Woohoo! Don’t worry, I’m not gonna go gushy over the whole leaves-changing thing ’cause I’m in Florida and for the most part we don’t see that stuff down here lol

So remember that post I did awhile back talkin’ about the print lab Mpix? Well, I sent them some of my images last Monday afternoon at around 3 pm. I ordered what I thought might be some of the most challenging pieces to put together: canvas wraps, standouts, foam backing, double-matte, and more with various print styles to boot. Besides the mind-blowing speed (I had the stuff in hand the next day by 2pm—less than 24 hours after I hit the order button), their cost-to-quality ratio is exceptional, and their staff are really patient and helpful. I finally found the right combination to display my HDR images. The Mpix folks have this metallic print process that is utterly freakin’ stunning—especially when used with High Dynamic Range imagery. Color reproduction is exceptional and they were able to retain all shadow and midtone detail (highlights were great too, but I’m all about sucking people in with shadow and midtone detail, so that’s where I place the most scrutiny). Even if you’re not shooting HDR and you just want a lab to print your stuff, or even see what your work would look like on canvas, give these guys a shot, hands down, they’re the best lab I’ve ever used and they’re really good people over there. If you are shooting HDR, go to www.mpix.com, upload your images, click the “Specialty Products” tab, select Standouts, and follow the instructions from there. Once you’re done with your adjustments, click the “Add to Cart” icon, go visit your cart and you’ll see your image. Click the thing that says “E-Surface” and select Metallic from the New Paper Type menu. I have no idea why I’ve busted out into a tutorial about a process that’s so intuitive, but I wanted to make sure you knew where to find the metallic print processing lol hopefully it’s just obvious that I’m really stoked about this discovery and I want to share it with y’all…they just do some awesome freakin’ work!

Man, I couldn’t be more thrilled to finally have a way to get my stuff printed and have it communicate the way the scene captured my imagination. Look at me…I’m gettin’ all misty <sniff> q: I wish you guys could see these things in person ’cause there’s just no way to relay the visual impact and how they command your attention. Maybe we can get something put together for Photoshop World…hmmm. Wow, okay I’m going on a bit too much here, but go check them out, you will not be disappointed if you do: Mpix.com.

In other news, my Chief, Scott Kelby, and his best-bud Terry White from Adobe Systems Inc., are almost done updating their most-recent co-authoring endeavor: The iPhone Book. To celebrate they started a photo contest! Check out that link and read how you could win a $500 Apple store gift card or many other prizes—there are lots of chances to win. While we’re talkin’ about Scott and Terry, you gotta check out their blogs. Scott’s “Photoshop Insider” blog will keep you in the loop on what’s going on worldwide in Photoshop and photography. And Terry White’s Tech Blog will keep you in the loop on all the latest technology—I visit his blog at least once a week to salivate over the latest and greatest in movie tech (and to snoop around for what’s going on at Adobe ’cause he’s really high on the food chain over there).

And finally—last but certainly not least—I just received my registration confirmation for the Adobe MAX Conference taking placing in San Francisco November 16–19. My buddy Chris Main, Managing Editor for Layers magazine (our sister publication…but don’t say that to Chris ’cause he gets miffed lol), and I are heading out to San Fran to get some killer CS4 training—plus we’ll get sneak peeks and the future of Adobe technologies while rubbing elbows with a unique cross-section of some of the brightest creative minds in various industries. As I’m sure you’re aware, I’m all about Photoshop, but the next victim on the stuff-I-need-to-learn-before-I-kick-the-bucket list is Flash. I’ve been studying ActionScript 3.0 here and there—watching quite a few of Lee Brimlow’s tutorials at www.gotoandlearn.com—while waiting for Flash CS4, which received some serious attention this upgrade cycle. So I’m gonna check out those classes and others on integrating Photoshop CS4 with Illustrator CS4 (admittedly, I’m a bit weirded out by Illustrator—not much patience for paths—so it’s time for me to get over it and learn more about that little vector-based freak lol).

Okay! That’s it folks, have an outstanding week! (:

Tags: Behind the Scenes at Photoshop User magazine, Chris Main, HDR, iPhone, Kelby Media Group, Layers magazine, Mpix 2.0, NAPP, National Association of Photoshop Professionals, Photography, Photoshop, Photoshop User magazine, Scott Kelby, Terry White

Howdy Folks!

Photoshop World Vegas has come to a close and we’re about to send another fine, fine issue of Photoshop User to the printers (thus the reason why I haven’t posted in awhile lol). Last week, the good folks over at Mpix sent me an invitation to have some of my work printed. As one might imagine, this was a blessing and a curse all in one shot for a number of reasons: 1) I have a terrible habit of going for a shoot and then blowing off the post production; 2) I work with a platoon of the best creatives in the industry, so it can be a bit daunting to show my own work; and 3) I’m #2 to Scott Kelby on the masthead, so my [poop] better at least be presentable, right?

So this weekend I sat down and went through my images to find something worthy of sending to Mpix’s lab for printing; they recently updated their website, which has propelled the company headlong into the life of 2.0, and I guess they need fodder for their new system. I think I found three or four that might be worth some canvas action; plus, there’s at least one that should look good rocking their metallic print processing. I saw one of Scott’s shots done this way and I was amazed at how it sucked you in and repelled you at the same time—brilliant. “How does this connect to Photoshop World,” I bet you’re wondering at this point.

While I was sitting there messing with my images, I grabbed the 2″-thick workbook containing my notes from Photoshop World and flipped to Ben Willmore’s class on High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography for some tips and inspiration…I’m telling you, that workbook by itself is worth the cost of admission to PSW. I’ve been shooting HDR for a couple years now and regardless of it’s sometimes cumbersome post-processing requirements, I dig it. (Here’s a link to one from awhile back that my buddy RC Concepcion posted on the Layers magazine homepage.) This shot is the crown jewel of the weekend. It’s an HDR I grabbed with the Nikon D3 after dropping wifey off at a bridal shower out in BFE/Clermont, Florida. I saw it as I was crossing a bridge, while on the phone with my buddy, Bryan Smathers. We were planning our mischief for the upcoming weekend (: I told him I had to call him back ’cause I saw this otherworldly image outside the passenger window. This shot was merged into HDR using Photomatix Pro 3 (which is the best freakin’ HDR software on the planet IMHO; visit www.hdrsoft.com for more info) and then I applied the “Scott Kelby 7-Point System” to really bring out the shadow and midtone details, and make it punch you in the chest (technically speaking). That’s a great book too btw.

Anyway, there’s this one step in his book where you use the Shadow/Highlights dialog (convert to smart object, and then go to the Image menu, under Adjustments). Well, when you shoot HDR, that dialog, when you click the More Options checkbox, is your best friend in Photoshop.

As you can see, it gets pretty beefy when you click that checkbox.

Okay, this is getting a bit involved, so I better break here; perhaps I’ll put up a full blown tutorial at a later time.

Here’s the final image that I’m planning to send for a canvas wrap. I hope y’all have a great week!!

Tags: Behind the Scenes at Photoshop User magazine, Kelby Media Group, Mpix 2.0, NAPP, National Association of Photoshop Professionals, Photography, Photoshop, Photoshop User magazine, Scott Kelby

Hello All!

I hope you had a good weekend. Ours was spent getting prepped for wannabe-hurricane, Tropical Storm Fay and getting this BLOG! up and running respectably enough to send to Mom. She prolly won’t read it, but it’s good to keep Mom’s in the loop, right? Speaking of moms, I saw…nah, it’s prolly too early to go there (:

The real story here is that my wife, Jennifer, toiled over the architecture of this BLOG! for almost the entire weekend. Only taking breaks to iron sheets and fold cloths. Man, am I am one lucky guy or what? (:

Okay, so here’s some news to brighten your Happy Hamburger Tuesday:

• Do you constantly hump the refresh button on your favorite news sites to see if anyone has swiped your copyrighted work? Well, hump no longer: A new product from Idee Canada called TinEye. It’s very cool stuff! You just upload your image (like, that one image that you thought TIME magazine stole from you) and TinEye crawls the Web, inspecting images pixel by pixel, checking to see if someone out there has used your image illegally. If it proves to work, this will be some pretty powerful software. Their CEO, Leila Boujnine, told PC Pro that, “TinEye does for images what Google did for text.” That’s an intensely bold statement! Can you imagine the huge lumps of backpay if you had your images registered at the US Copyright Office and TinEye found that someone misappropriated your image?
• We just received our house copies of Photoshop User September 2008! Woohoo! And it looks absolutely beautiful! Man, sometimes it just makes me wanna pound myself in the face! Huh? Oh, never mind lol Just grab a copy, flip through it, and you’ll see what I mean when I harp on and on about “working with the best people in the business” (: Oh, I almost forgot to mention, this is an EXTRA special edition. Our President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) and Editor-in-Chief of Photoshop User (a.k.a. my Chief; a.k.a. a bunch of other things), Scott Kelby, had a little birthday surprise in mind for me this issue. He’s aware that I’ve been struggling to get up to speed with everything here and that I haven’t really had time to write anything substantial lately. So, to push me into the deep end of the pool and get me swimming, Scott asked me to write the “From the [Managing] Editor” article for this issue! This is a great honor because that page usually comes from the Chief—and only the Chief. It came out great, and thankfully we had a headshot on hand because Scott shot me awhile back while he was working on that “Cool, Gritty Look” everyone’s been after.
• You’ll notice a new “Life” tab at the top of the center window: I have the strangest [poop] happen to me on a daily basis, so we’ve added this as a space for me to vent and describe the full range of craziness—from good to bad. I just need to find a way to keep kids out so I don’t have to worry about my mouth!

Whelp, I guess that’s it for now. I’ll try to get something written up for the Life tab this evening. I’ll probably password protect it or find a way to incorporate an age-verification window…or something. Anyways, if I don’t see you (due to some sort of technical difficulties and/or whatnot) then have a GREAT WEEK!

Chow Mien~

~Issac

Tags: Editor Note, Hurricane Fay, Issac, Issac Stolzenbach, Kelby Media Group, Life Tab, NAPP, National Association of Photoshop Professionals, Photoshop, Photoshop User, Photoshop User magazine, Scott, Scott Kelby, Sept. 2008, TinEye, Tropical Storm Fay

Wow! It’s amazing what can happen in 48 hours. We (Kelby Cross High A/V Club) had a helluva good time over the weekend putting a film together for the 48 Hour Film contest that made its way to the Tampa/St. Pete area this past weekend. We hung out together at the office last Friday night while trying to squeeze together the contest’s essential elements (Genre: Thriller, Character: Bob Percival, Prop: a hairdryer, and line of dialog: “How could you do this to me?” Friday night (July 18, 2008), I had the opportunity to work with some of our most-elite troops at Kelby Media Group. While Corey Barker (my best bud, Photoshop User columnist, and Education and Curriculum developer at Kelby Media Group) and Jason “Scriv” Scrivner (the Brains operating behind the award-winning podcast PhotoshopUserTV, Co-Director of our project, and I believe our first video dude…back when we were KW Media Group) were in the air flying back from a couple days of training in San Jose, CA. Meanwhile, a bunch of use were kickin’ around ideas in the conference room at our main building up until around 2 am Saturday morning–the fellas would finally land safely in Tampa and return to us safely come Saturday morning; however, Scriv’s iPod touch and noise-canceling headphones would not (sorry for your loss man). In the conference room was Adam “Head Queso” Rohrmann, Stephen “Cougar Bait” Bell, Bill “The Newbie” Duffin, Erik “The Big Kahuna” Kuna, Juan “The Magic” Alfonso, and Paul “The I.T. Guy” Wilder.

Man, you wanna talk about the most creative, fun, insightful, patient, brilliant, and wild bunch in town? It was a total blast getting in writing-room-lock-down mode with them. After the creative juices got flowing–around 1 am, four hours after getting the details of the short movie–we had Paul Wilder in position to be the mysteriously creepy Hannibil Lecter-like character who had a taste for livers (he wrote his grotesque recipes for cooking human parts in a Moleskine notebook with lemon juice and sent them overseas, where his international freak-friend would use a hairdryer to decode them). It seemed we were going in circles for the most part and I pushed for a break so we could sleep on it and consider the development of the characters.

The next morning, I had an Bob’s whole background in mind (or so I thought lol)–he’s a haunted veteran and we’ll push the audience into thinking he’s developed a taste for killing ’cause that’s clique and what one might expect, but actually he’s simply developed a taste for Arabic foods. Jennifer (wifey) and I arrived a tad late and by the time we got there, the script changed completely. After some sleep, the directors figured it wouldn’t be the best idea to have this crazed-and-somewhat-leaky-trousered-perverted character running around with our company name stamped on it…it’s just not who we are (well, it’s not who MOST of us are lol). All of us agreed that we should keep it under control.

Scriv explained the new plan, which in essence, is the one that’s sitting on the DVD in the judge’s office. I guess I could sit here writing all night about this adventure, but we’ve got to save most of it so there’s something to see this Wednesday, July 23 at Channelside in Tampa (: I saw the completed project today and it’s a freakin’ riot! Everyone contributed at least a sentence to the main script. Plus, we have some great shots we need to get off the D3 and post a slide show or something.

Oh, and I wanted to give a shout out to Erik B. for leaving me some comments. Thanks for checking back here and giving me a push to start posting here again, man! He was going to design this ’site for me, but I figured it would be great for my wife and I to try and learn how to do it.

Tags: 48 Hour Film Project, 48 hour project, Behind the Scene at Kelby Media, Behind the Scenes at Kelby Media Group, Kelby Media Group, Life at Kelby Media Group, Photoshop Guys, Photoshop User, PhotoshopUser TV