Are you ever in a situation with a model or subject and can’t get the perfect position out of them? If yes, then this is your luck day. I came across a great article that gives 10 top portrait tips to help you capture the uniqueness of your subject.
One that I found interesting is #9.“DO make sure to separate the arms from the waist. Arms flat against the side of your subject create the illusion of a very wide waist.” Or you can always adjust for that in Photoshop ;)
I came across this great photo series on Flickr, entitled Pencil vs Camera by artist Ben Heine. It is always interesting to see how different mediums can be combined, especially when it comes from reality (photos) and imagination (drawings). Ben used a traditional method to do his sketches. All the graphic elements shown come from his own stock/production. He drew the sketches, took the photos, and edited them.
©Ben Heine
Here at Digital Anarchy we have always been a big supporter of how illustrations can play a role within photography. Our plugin ToonIt! Photo lets you create cartoon effects, like shading and lines, from your own photographic images. Learn more about ToonIt! Photo here.
I had a few extra moments to play with the Pencil vs Camera concept using my own images and ToonIt! Photo. I shot these photos in Santa Cruz, CA on a very overcast day about two years ago. I would have liked to have a more pleasing sky but you can’t always get what you want, right? Here are the results:
Every so often I get an email that makes me smile. I like good marketing and catchy marketing language. This email from Layers magazine fits that category.
My Layers subscription is running out and the reminder email is titled: “It’s all fun and games till someone expires”. Funny! A great reminder as well that you can get someone to sit up and notice if you do it in the right way. Learn about Layers magazine at www.layersmagazine.com.
I personally love Layers because they give terrific tips about all of the Adobe CS5 software, and they also write some pretty sweet stuff about our Digital Anarchy products. So does their sister magazine Photoshop User and the related internet channel Layers TV. Check out some recent reviews of our 3D Invigorator plugin on this Press page.
regards -debbie
More photos from our model shoot for Beauty Box, our video skin retouching plugin. Debbie had a little downtime while the set was being shifted around and became very interested in her feet. Then Maggie’s feet and finally the whole room of feet.
Yesterday Digital Anarchy did a photoshoot for our Beauty Box product for video skin retouching. Well actually for our Beauty Box PRODUCTS, since we have related product coming out really soon. (Stay tuned for that exciting news!)
We had two terrific models participating in the shoot, which took place at Jim’s apartment. Towards the end of the day, his fluffy cat got curious and investigated the scene. I don’t think that cats need skin retouching but maybe we will come out with a fur smoothing product.
Molotov Cupcake got a little indignant when we booted her from the ‘set’. The model got a little mock indignant when Jim proclaimed that the cutest shot all day was of the cat!
While I find captchas as annoying as, well, everyone else does, I also enjoy the beauty of their randomness. Our company Digital Anarchy builds some of its products around that idea, like our Texture Anarchy pattern generator for Photoshop textures. Texture Anarchy harnesses fractal noise, algorithms and other techy chaos into really pretty textures.
A few days ago, I posted an ad in the Talent section of Craigslist. The captcha that I had to fill out, ‘discontented bacon’, was geekiness to its max. More on what this talent ad was for in a few days… we’re excited.
Since one week is a decade in internet time, I’m seeing this February post about green screening an eternity too late. But I still think it’s interesting, as is most of the stuff that I find through BoingBoing.net. The movie shown below is the 2009 Virtual Backlot Reel from Stargate Studios.
It’s fascinating — and maybe a bit disturbing — to realize that mundane scenes in TV shows are now regularly treated as visual effects events. Digital Anarchy first developed Primatte Chromakey, our Adobe Photoshop plugin for green screen masking, in mid-2005. At the time, we had to spend a lot of time simply explaining to photographers what ‘green screen’ meant. Five years later, green screen is a recognized entity with information accessible on non-pro sites like ehow.com. The convergence continues!
I’ve always said that I’d prefer to have an Evil Geek (Bill Gates) rule the world instead of an Evil Marketing Guy (Steve Jobs). Sort of like the difference between having the nerds or the cool kids run your high school. And sure enough, now that Steve has a dominent platform, he’s running it like the cool kids would.
I mean seriously. Geek evil is sort of like ‘pinky and the brain’ evil. Yeah, they might take over the world, but that’s what they plan every night. And even if they succeed, all they’ll end up doing is having chair jumping contests and all night Star Trek marathons (how else do you explain much of Microsoft’s software?)
Marketers, like Steve, are different.
Joe Farace lights up the room in two ways. He is a talented photographer, writer and teacher whose emails end with catchy signatures like ‘It’s 2010 and the Big Bang never ended’ or ‘Saving the world, one pixel at a time’. He is also an expert on lighting and imaging techniques for photographers.
Recently, Joe showed me a photo composite that he created while writing one of his upcoming books. The image was masked with Primatte Chromakey, our blue / green screen Adobe Photoshop plugin.
I love play on words. Moreso, I love gorgeous images that inspire me to write. This artwork by Carl Campbell has accomplished all of the above. Carl used ToonIt Photo, our Adobe Photoshop cartoon plugin, to transform a BMW car into something even more special.
Yesterday I stumbled upon NotAlwaysRight.com. The website covers customer service bloopers and my favorite entry by far is Beyond Even The Power Of Pixel Dust. This entry details a customer asking a copy shop employee to remove one of three people in a photo.
From www.notalwaysright.com:
“Customer: “Hi, I’d like a copy of this photo, but I need one the people cropped out. “
(The customer hands me a photo of three men, arms around each other’s shoulders in front of a brick wall.)
Me: “Which one needs to be cropped out?”
Customer: “The guy in the middle.”
Me: “Well, we really can’t do that. That is more for a photo-refinishing artist.”
Customer: “Can’t you just erase the guy in the middle?”
Me: “We could, but then there would be a blank space were he once was. It would be pretty obvious.”
Customer: “Oh, you won’t just see the wall behind him if he is removed?”
Me: “No, the camera doesn’t take a picture of what is behind the person, just what you see.”
Customer: “What if it was a digital camera?”
Since Digital Anarchy specializes in Adobe Photoshop plugins, I talk to a variety of folks each day with a different level of understanding about how digital imaging works. I wonder how many of you have experienced this kind of question from your clients or customers. The blooper comes from my hometown of Philly, PA, which is cherry filling as well as that much more embarrassing.
There has been a great deal of commotion over a web site called Spokeo. Spokeo aggregates personal info about people. So all the info that’s in public records is combined with all the info you’ve put on the web about yourself, which is then viewable by other people.
Many people I know are freaked out about this. One person was shocked that her photos and blog posts were found. Seriously. There’s a lot of folks out there who are unclear on how all these cookies, logging, networking, and whatever else works.
Privacy Law Needs To Be Updated. Support dotrights.org
Notwithstanding obvious things like blogs, that we put up so other people can see, our privacy is being eroded fast.
Ever since they started shooting motion pictures one of the biggest questions have been… How do you keep the damn camera steady? And what do you do about it if it’s not? If you’re a photographer just getting into shooting video with your DSLR, you’re likely to have the same questions. I’ll give you some answers to the first question and a few tips on dealing with the second.
While a shaky camera can be used, on rare occasion, to good effect… it’s usually something to be avoided. More often than not, it just means your watching a B horror flick and the owner of said shaky camera is about to be bitten in half. Hopefully we can get you shooting stable video so as to insure you are not similarly attacked by creatures that are aggravated by shaky video.
So… how do you avoid such a fate?
NAB is a huge three letters in the film and television world. However, most photographers will never have heard of it.
It stands for National Association of Broadcasters, which is the film/tv industry lobbying organization and they throw the annual NAB tradeshow which gets about 100,000 people. Yeah, 100,000. It’s massive. Everything you could think of needing for shooting a film/video production is there. From hdmi cables to helicopters.
So what’s this got to do with photographers?
Continue reading Are You A Photographer Shooting Video? Go to NAB.
Every so often, I get an email from a customer (or potential customer) that makes me smile, laugh, or do both aloud. This morning was a great example. The first email was titled ‘HELP’ and said:
I had a chuckle over this letter but before I could write back, I noticed a second email sent 20 minutes later by Tom. The title was ‘After careful review and strong black coffee’.
Thanks Tom! You get one of our cool Anarchist tshirts as ‘thank you’ schwagg for making me smile before MY coffee kicked in.
By the way, turns out that Tom hadn’t unwrapped the 3D Invigorator plugin from its ZIP file, which is kinda like a tupperware container. You can read about how to install for Windows on this page and Mac installation on this page. Try out our 3D Inivgorator plugin, which is a Photoshop 3D plugin for making 3D logos, by going to the Demos page.
I recently came across a blog post by Fuzzy Duenkel, a photographer over in Wisconsin. He makes a pretty passionate case against using scene swapping (e.g. the type of stuff you do with Primatte and green screen) for traditional, ‘classic’ portraits. By and large I agree with him. I don’t think it’s a great use of the technology to put someone in a place they’ve never been so they can say they were there. For novelty photos and the like, it’s great, but for a ‘classic’ portrait, maybe not so much. But there’s more to portraits than just the classic look.
Image by Deverie FX, www.deveriefx.com
Continue reading Portrait Illusions – Green Screen and Other Tricks
Having worked with Digital Anarchy for many years, I am often asked how decisions are made. We are pretty small staff and everyone is always running around trying to make their own tasks happen. How do we take the time to focus on monthly goals, development priorities and the like?
It’s simple: We order Chinese food for lunch.
3D tends to be a new thing for most people, so we get a lot of questions about it. Here are the most frequently asked ones, the basic answers, and links to our video tutorials that explain the answers in depth.
1: My Illustrator files won’t import, why?
Save Illustrator Files as Invigorator 10 files. Invigorator can’t read vector files saved out in newer Illustrator formats. So save your files as Illustrator 10 files to ensure they’ll come into 3D Invigorator. See the tutorial on Illustrator files:
http://digitalanarchy.com/3Dinvig/tutes.html#t6
2: My complex Illustrator file isn’t coming in correctly. Why?
Continue reading 9 1/2 Most Frequently Asked 3D Invigorator Questions
Good article on Ragen.com about the ‘4 techniques for spicing up corporate photos‘. This website typically reports and comments on Public Relations news, so it’s interesting to find this article. But since 1,000 words equal one photograph, or so the saying goes, it makes sense.
Summary of the four tips to take compelling corporate photos, which is almost an oxymoron:
“1. Change the angle. The easiest way to add interest to a potentially boring photo is to move your camera off-center. Try shooting from the sides, above, below, or behind—a different perspective can go a long way… [For instance] Salvo says she’s had some success taking award photos from behind the stage rather than in front.”
Ok, this isn’t a corporate photo. But it’s an interesting angle of my dog and his little friend.
If you pay attention to news sites covering digital graphics, there have been interesting articles surfacing about the the Avatar movie. There is quite a bit of talk about the philosophy and technology behind the movie, perhaps a tad on the over-analyzing side of things, but personally, I still find this topic more interesting than a rant about the new iPad.
In Post magazine — consistently a terrific source of film related news — there are two articles about how director James Cameron took motion capture into a new level of technology. The article ‘‘Avatar’ Introduces a New Era in Filmmaking‘ talks about his vision of a system that provides performance capture rather than motion capture. The article ‘Director’s Chair: James Cameron – Avator‘ goes into more detail about this new system, called the Simulcamera.
When we first launched Primatte, we tested a variety of ‘greenscreen’ backgrounds to determine what to recommend. Paper backgrounds turned out to be worst and we had the best luck with a velcro/foam material.
Well… apparently not all paper backgrounds are made equal!
I don’t remember who made the paper background we initially tested. But it was awful. Very reflective and prone to hot spots. We figured all paper would have the same problems. After listening to a talk by another company that does greenscreen software, I decided to revisit this and give Savage Paper’s ‘tech green #46’ a try.
So how’d it fare vs. the foam materail we’ve been recommending since day 1?
Around the holidays, we received a great compliment about Beauty Box from customer Ross Webb. Beauty Box is our new skin retouching software for video footage in After Effects and Final Cut Pro.
I asked Ross about his work. He said, “My history is around AE but I’m using FCP for this. The footage is owned by me, shot on a canon 7D. It’s glamour and the model had really bad scarring on her face.”
Thanks Ross. We wish great success to your project. And continued success to our skin smoothing product, for which you can see examples here.
Digital Anarchy exhibited at the Senior Portrait Artists (SPA) Event earlier this week. It was yet another trade show, but this time we were on the island of Coronado, just off the sunny coastline of San Diego, CA.
We stayed and worked in the grand Hotel de Coronado, which is a grand hotel dating to 1888 and considered a National Historical Landmark. (Interesting history is here.) It was wonderful to be in a hotel that was next to the beach and lined with palm trees, especially during the winter, but the lush surroundings did present a small problem. Continue reading Trade show amid the palm trees.
It’s no secret that digital cameras have been big business this, er… last decade.
However the Financial Times reports a new wrinkle. DSLR sales have slowed significantly less than point-and-shoot sales, meaning the DSLRs are making up a larger share of the digital camera market. Over 8 million DSLRs will be sold in 2009.
What does this mean? How does it affect photographers?
On the heels of a wonderful customer email from 2009, I’d like to show you my favorite email from 2010. Never mind that the year is only two days old. This email will quickly become a classic around our office.
Michael Maller emailed us regarding his recent purchase of Beauty Box. This is our new skin retouching software for video footage in After Effects and Final Cut Pro. Michael had some great things to say about the subtle effect that Beauty Box provides when smoothing away wrinkles, blemishes and other skin issues.
I had a very nice email exchange with customer John Gunmann a few months ago. Meant to blog immediately about the talk but other conversations kept piling on top. Figure this topic will be a wonderful final post of 2009. Especially since John was so pleased that he told me to buy a top shelf drink on the Digital Anarchy tab, which perhaps I will do tonight for New Years Eve.
Nice mention of two Digital Anarchy plugins in the Flashcriminals roundup of ‘super charged’ Photoshop plugin. This list summarizes “30 Plugins to Supercharge Photoshop” and says, “I have compiled a list of free and commercial plug-ins to supercharge Photoshop. Each of these will speed up your work, reduce the number of steps needed and help you create amazing effects. Some of them will help you even develop effects otherwise not possible in Photoshop.”
The blog roundup lists 3D Invigorator, our 3D logo creator for Photoshop.This plugin gives instant 3D gratification by turning text and shapes and even Illustrator imports into extruded 3D graphics. Try out the demo here.
The list also includes Backdrop Designer (a personal favorite of mine) which digitally simulates muslin material backgrounds. It’s especially fun to use if you are posing a pretty girl in front of the digital drapery. Try out the demo here.
Beauty Box has been a very fun product to develop. The best part of releasing our new Beauty Box product, I think, was working with the models who lent their beauty and time. After the photoshoot, we treated their skin with our Final Cut Pro plugin in post-production. This smoothed out their blemishes, laugh lines and other issues with their skin quality.
Before the models arrived, Digital Anarchy spent the morning preparing the shoot area. We decided to convert the living room of our Chief Executive Anarchist, Jim Tierney, rather than renting a space. His purple velvet couch made a terrific rich backdrop and we hung black striped curtains to frame the shots. Some of the footage was shot outside; luckily the weather held. San Francisco in December can be very cold or very warm, often within the same three hour period.
Sitting in for the models before they arrive:
Potential 3D content?
I sat next to the manager of the CBS station on a recent flight. Among other things we chatted about 3D TV and it’s purpose (if any) and whether it was just a fad. Particularly since everyone has just upgraded to HD.
HD is the type of technology that lots of people can understand and get behind. It’s ‘un-intrusive’, meaning it just makes everything look better. You don’t notice the technology after viewing it a few times (or until you see an SD show). People watching just see a better picture, so they’re happy, and producers don’t have to dramatically change how they shoot and tell stories, so they’re happy (except for the make-up artists who now really need to cover up those unsightly blemishes and removed tattoos… or they can use Beauty Box :-). Everyone has to buy some new equipment, but otherwise the changes are minimal.
3D is very intrusive. And does anyone really want it? Continue reading Why 3D TV Is A Gimmick
And we’re back. Digital Anarchy is once again making plugins for After Effects and Final Cut Pro. Our first new product is Beauty Box 1.0, which was released yesterday. In a nutshell, this plugin automatically does skin retouching, which reduces wrinkles and removes blemishes.
If you weren’t able to hire a makeup artists for your shoot, or you just have regular people who look, well… regular, then Beauty Box allows you to do skin retouching without having to go frame by frame. It’s a powerful new plugin that uses face detection and an advanced smoothing algorithms to smooth out the skin while keeping all the other details sharp and in focus.
Of course, we have the privilege of working with beautiful models. But Beauty Box will make everyone look beautiful! Ok, well, maybe not everyone. But if it’s possible, Beauty Box makes it easier to get them there.
My biggest frustration with the 5D is the lack of AutoFocus.
You get very use to AF on traditional camcorders and not having really affects how you shoot. You definitely can’t move around as much as you would with a normal camcorder. It is possible to hit the AF-ON button and get it to re-focus, but this is quite a bit different than dynamic, I-don’t-have-to-think-about-it Autofocus.
So it has it’s shortcomings, but this is partially made up for by the absolutely beautiful video. So my top 10 observations about it…
Ok, well I only hate one common use of it. That surreal, oversaturated look that seems to be the first thing everyone does when they try the technique. You don’t even need to use HDR, there’s a photoshop plugin for it and you can use Camera Raw to pull it off. Here’s an example of the style:
HDR Gone Bad
It’s a novelty look and I’m over it. It was cool for a very short time, then everyone decided they wanted to have surreal images. It’s not that hard of a look to achieve, so it’s not that impressive. Get over it. :-) I much prefer to use HDR for what it was meant for… which is giving a slightly wider dynamic range to create a shot that has similar contrast and color range to what your eye actually sees. No one has seen colors like the photo above has. Alright, well, yeah I’ve taken mushrooms too, so maybe then… but not normally.
The better use for HDR…
Our Digital Anarchy Flickr site is pretty new. The president’s Flickr stream has been around since April. What does this say about a government institution having better web 2.0 outreach than a young software company? I hope it’s just a commentary on the Obama admin being better staffed rather than more precocious than us.
See if you can figure which link is ours.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalanarchy/sets/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/sets/
On the White House Flickr stream, the photos that I am digging are decidedly non-presidential. They show Obama as a eprson, not a politician, which I would guess is the point of having a stream. Hopefully, you can enjoy seeing a photo of the US president playing hoops, and playing pretty well, no matter what your politics are.
On the Digital Anarchy Flickr stream, I am digging being able to add in photos that don’t have a proper home on our DigitalAnarchy.com website. There is more flexibility in posting a string of fun, related photos on Flickr then adding similar (= repetative) images to the website.
Wired magazine did an interesting piece on the president’s Flickr stream a few months ago. It covers a bit of the history of photo documenting the less rigid side of presidency. Wired hasn’t covered Digital Anarchy’s stream yet but there’s still time…
No… not your wife/husband, sheesh… the dirty minds of you people.
Your info. Your techniques. Tips and tricks. I had an interesting tech support call yesterday with one of our users. He’s a photographer that’s been using Primatte for some time. He related an encounter he had with a fellow photographer in his area. She asked him what he was using to create his greenscreen shots, and he told her to go buy one of our competitor’s products! His logic was that he wasn’t going to share info with someone in the same market. He was quite pleased that she was unable to get the same results and was frustrated by the whole thing.
So my question to you is… do you share?
According to Adobe, developers can now use Flash to build iPhone apps. Click here for the whole story.
This does not mean the Flash player is available on the iPhone. Only that the Flash development environment can now build iPhone apps.
Apple of course does not want the Flash player on the iPhone. Why? If you can build iPhone apps that are usable through a browser, who’s going to buy them through the Apple App Store? We’ll see how badly Apple cripples support of HTML 5 in Safari since HTML 5, in some cases, will allow you to build rich internet apps and theoretically get around the App store as well.
3D Invigorator, our Photoshop plugin for creating 3D logos and objects, just got 5 stars and a Hot Pick from Photoshop User. Dave Huss loved the plugin, but took exception with the name, which he thought sounded like a back massager. We’re not entirely clear what kind of back massagers he’s used to using, but, then again, there’s many things we wonder about those NAPP authors.
Anyways, pick up the latest issue of Photoshop User to read the full review. In honor of the review, we’ve recreated their Hot Pick logo in 3D.
The Nobel Prize for physics went, in part, to William Boyle and George Smith who invented the Charged Coupled Device. The CCD is what allows all of your digital cameras to capture photos. So as your running around with your cameraphone, DSLR, HD video camera, or whatever give a nod to the physicists who allow you to capture light.
A tech side note… I saw this photo in a newspaper and started searching around online for it. Google Images completely failed. Microsoft’s Bing found it on the second try. At least for image searching, it would appear Google has some competition.
In part 1 I discussed some of the habits that may or may not develop. Now I’m going to talk technology. While at the Digital Imaging conference a few technology things kept coming up… Cameraphones, the cloud, and social networks. Not exactly unexpected.
The interesting thing about cameraphones is 1) how they will evolve and affect point and shoot cameras and 2) how are users storing and managing their photos.
This little piece of work from Samsung not only has a 5mp camera, but shoots decent HD video as well.
Just got back from the InfoTrends Digital Imaging conference. There seems to be alot of speculation around the future of photography, including the 6Sight conference which is dedicated to the question. So, let’s talk about prints, clouds, camera phones, and some of the other stuff that came up at the conference.
One of the interesting observations at the conference was the way our picture taking habits are changing. We (as a society) are taking a LOT more pictures. However, these pictures tend to have a lower value on average, with a shorter shelf life so to speak. In the past, pictures were somewhat difficult to take and get printed so there was some value to them, even the crappy ones. Now we snap pictures everywhere, immediately send them around to our network of friends. We can immediately see our friends pictures who are doing the same thing. But a lot of these photos are ‘of the moment’. Pictures from very recent events that are not great photos, but are interesting because of their immediacy. Most are not pictures you’ll be looking at five years from now. There are a few things that can change the value of a picture immediately, for example, if someone passes away any pictures you have of them become more valuable.
Another interesting point was that the value of some pictures have a ‘V’ shaped curve over time. They are very valuable when first taken, but that value diminishes over time. However at some point along the timeline, because of the age of the photo, a death, or something else, the value of the photo starts to increase.
Ok, but why does this matter?
Sometimes my workday, like yours, starts before my coffee kicks in.
Here at Digital Anarchy, we are always available to find your old serial number or resend you an installer. Our records are quite good and typically we can go back seven years, to the company’s beginnings, to find your information. This customer service is especially important since we don’t ship our products on disk but instead provide digital download.
This week, I received an email from a customer who had purchased our Backdrop Designer product — a cool Adobe Photoshop plugin that makes muslin-esque textures for digital backgrounds — in 2005 and needed to reinstall. I located the customer in our Backdrop Designer database, updated his serial number through our new system, and sent off the info. I was extremely delighted to get this positive email back from Ron. Continue reading Helping the Top Dog.
Here’s a great article on staying positive at work, despite the recession and whatnot. The article includes a number of tips on accomplishing a positive mind, most of which are applicable to life in general, not just work.
http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/03/news/economy/happy.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2009080310
Smiley face courtesy of our 3D Photoshop plugin, called 3D Invigorator, which creates 3D objects and logos. Fun stuff. Continue reading Benefits of Being Positive
Should photographers be shooting video? In most cases, I think the answer is no.
It’s not that most photographers aren’t capable of it, it’s just that videography is an entirely different medium that takes just as long as photography to learn properly.
If you’re willing to take the time to really understand video, then sure have at it. But while your capturing video, your not capturing photos. Will doing both compromise both, and make you a mediocre videographer AND a mediocre photographer?
What is Photo Fusion?
The Palm Pre Phone has a starring role in a TV mini-series. Or did, since this series happened in early August. Coincidentally, Palm is also the sponsor of ‘Bollywood Hero’.
I know that cars — like the VW Bug, Mini Cooper and most famously Bullitt’s Mustang — have been used as a centerpiece in movies. Don’t think a piece of hardware has been a starring role previously unless you count Carrie’s Mac laptop in Sex & The City.
With so much technology around, can you use it to enhance photographs to tell more complete and compelling stories?
One beautiful example comes from Todd Sanchioni. Todd is a San Francisco based photographer who recently had an exhibit that featured Laos street musicians. The photographs were compelling in their own right, but he added an mp3 player to each piece which played the music of the musician in the photo.
While Todd is certainly not the first photographer to do such things, I thought it was a particularly good reminder that as we’re out shooting, it’s easy to capture other media. Our cameras can capture video. Our cell phones can record audio. It’s never been easier to add extra dimensions to photography.
The photo should always be able to stand by itself, but if you can add more context and meaning by including audio or video, there’s a great deal to be said for that. Of course, some common sense should be applied to this type of mixed media. Mp3s along with photos of musicians and their instruments adds depth to the piece. Putting mp3s of war sounds next to war photographs would, in most cases, take away from the photos.
I think for mixed media to really work, the artist/photographer needs to really understand all the media types they are working with. If that’s the case, the overall effect can be quite stunning.
Ron Kalstein, M.Ed. is a long-time customer of Digital Anarchy, and quite the accomplished digital professional. His degree acronym certainly conveys this and his job title is the impressive ‘Media Services Director of the Albert Einstein Healthcare Network’ in Philadelphia, PA.
Equally impressive is the artwork that Ron creates for Albert Einstein Network. In response to a general call-out for artwork created with our 3D Photoshop plugin, 3D Invigorator, Ron emailed this wonderful piece.
Working for a software company can be very fun, especially when I am able to use the software for good (aka personal) purposes. In this case, I saw a friend post a photo of herself and her boyfriend in her Facebook profile. She titled it ‘Pamela & Graah as a cartoon’ and I thought, “harumph”.
Not by ToonIt!:
The image shown above was converted to a crappy cartoon by the Photo DJ function in my friend’s camera. It’s just a glorified postorization. I immediately IM’ed my friend and asked her to email me the original photo. She did. I ran the photo through ToonIt’s default settings and 35 seconds later, Pamela and Graah were properly tooned.
Cartooned by ToonIt:
Digital Anarchy recently added a great photographer to our Primatte Chromakey gallery. His name is Shawn Wright and he runs Wright Studios out of Indiana, USA with his wife Betsy.
Shawn is a photographer of all talents and trades. Not only does he specialize in many subjects — high school seniors, industrial product shots and sports teams, to name a few — but he also runs photography seminars. More info on his company site, www.wrightstudio.us.
LENNON the Photographer has given us terrific celebrity images that he creates, in part, with our Adobe Photoshop greenscreen plugin, Primatte Chromakey. A year after we first talked to LENNON about his work, he contacted us with more high-profile photography. There is a **gorgeous** shot of Gilles Marini from Dancing with the Stars, as shown below.
Something that I really enjoy about LENNON is that his personality seems as colorful as the celebrities that he photographs. That’s why his first name is always written in CAPS; very Hollywood, yes?
Continue reading Celebrities of LENNON the Photographer, Part II.
Last week, we received an order for our Backdrop Designer plugin. On that same day, we received a request to resend a previous purchase of the Backdrop Designer plugin. Since I am Digital Anarchy’s customer service person and our order fulfillment department — as well as blogger extraordinaire — I recognized the name in both emails. The customer already owned Backdrop Designer but was purchasing it again.
This is one of the reasons we hand fill orders. It’s not uncommon for someone to forget he already owns a product. It’s also not uncommon for someone to think she bought the product when really she only downloaded the demo. This was the basis of two different support calls last week.
(By the way, I feel this theory should extend to cheesecake. I should be able taste its sweetness just thinking about eating cake, and therefore save myself the calories.)
Royalty-free cheesecake served up from www.freefoto.com. Cool stuff on that site.
Digital Anarchy recently added an interesting artist to our ToonIt! Photo gallery. Her name is Chrissie Campbell and she is truly a woman of many mediums and skills. I love the main image on her website’s About page. It seems to pull in all of her talents: painting, photography and digital manipulation. Very contemporary and strong but with a delicate stylization.
It’s fun becoming friendly with someone online, then discovering details like where she lives. Chrissie’s business name is ‘Kakadu Design’ and it didn’t occur to me what that indicated until I visited her website and looked at the promo images. Kakadu National Park is located in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Continue reading Outback art with Chrissie Campbell.
Yesterday, I joined Photoshop product manager Bryan O’neil-Hughes for his Photowalk. This was part of the effort by NAPP to get folks out and taking pictures. There were photowalks all over the nation because of this.
It’s a pretty cool idea and was great fun. Adobe rockstar Julieanne Kost joined us along with a few other Adobe folks. The walk itself was fairly short in length and mostly went a few blocks around the Adobe campus in San Jose. You’d be surprised at how long it takes for 50 photographers to go a few blocks. In any event, this led to many photos of the Adobe building (there also seemed to be a good deal of photographers taking pictures of photographers).
When you go on walks like this, it’s interesting what your choice of lens does to your photos.
So according to a story in todays Wall Street Journal, Apple is feeling stung by the recent Microsoft ads that show regular folks shopping for laptops and trying to buy one under $1000. Here’s one of the Laptop Hunter ads:
Clever commercials, not quite as clever as the Mac vs. PC ads, but obviously effective. Apple apparently had lawyers call Microsoft and request they stop running the ads.
Only Apple would have the balls to call a competitor and ask them to stop running ads that make them look bad. “Those ads are true! How dare you run them!” Poor Apple. It’s kind of hilarious.
Here’s a link to the Journal article if you want to read it for yourself.
btw… It is true that the same laptop will usually be cheaper on the Windows side, especially if you time your purchase with a Dell 30% off sale, which are frequent these days. The fact that Apple’s machines never go on sale makes them more pricey than similar Windows machines which are constantly on sale. The laptops in the Laptop Hunter ads are usually a bit less powerful than the higher priced Apple, but the reality of computers is that many people don’t need the extra power.
fwiw… I’m platform agnostic. I use both Macs and PCs and have a love/hate relationship with both. If I get to a point where I’m thinking about the operating system, it means that said computer has done something that makes me want to drop kick it through a window. I haven’t found either platform to be more or less problematic. Yes, Vista 1.0 sucked… but then, OS X 10.2 was fraught with problems as well. It happens.
Jim Tierney, the President and ‘CEA’ of Digital Anarchy, recently sat down to talk with Grant Friedman of Colorburned.com. This is a terrific blog and info site that I became aware of when Grant contacted us about some of his online contests. Jim and Grant had a lively conversation via email, as many of us do these days. You can read Colorburned’s interview with Jim Tierney here on their site.
Continue reading Chief Executive Anarchist on Colorburned.com.
A few days ago, I received a great email from a new customer named Mark Edwards. He wrote us a nice note about his purchase of ToonIt! Photo, which is our Adobe Photoshop cartooning plugin, and attached some images to his email.
Mark said, “Thanks for the cool tool. After only a few minutes of playing around with it, I decided to buy it (original and toonit versions of one picture attached). Love it!”
Mark’s ToonIt image:
While performing as a musician for the Fashion Week in Delhi, artist Nick Cattermole took a lot of photographs around the McLeod Ganj area of India. Nick’s two primary subjects in this photo series are monkeys and monks. These are subjects whose relationship to each other — in my eyes — is bound only by their English spelling and co-existence in a geographic region. But Nick has put together an interesting body of work that combines the inhabitants of both temples and forests in McLeod Ganj.
I love that Nick uses our ToonIt! Photo plugin to transform his photographs into delicate illustrations. Many people use ToonIt! for more ‘aggressive’ images, which is what cartoons typically look like, all thick black lines and bold heavy color fields. Nick’s illustrations are instead turned into soft, thin lines over a jeweled, geometric pattern of color.
Monk walking in the village, post-ToonIt! treatment:
While writing a post about how my little iThing takes great digital photos, I did some news surfing about the shrinking size of technology. The two articles listed below caught my eye. Their topics are different but the underlying theme is similar.
First, on Computerworld.com, an article called ‘Future shock: The PC of 2019‘ talks how personal computers will look in a decade: Small.
Just yesterday, I took this photo of a charming chalk stamp on the pavement. Seems to fit the topic of this post because ‘Thylacine’ is a generally extinct, but still sighted and possibly mythological creature. Just like technology can be. See this Bizzare & Extinct site for images.
For the July 4th weekend, I went to a friend’s cabin in the Russian River, California area. The town of Guerneville has tons of scenic photo opps and upon arriving, I was dismayed that I had forgotten to pack both my SLR camera and my little point and shoot. Luckily I had my iPhone with me. I couldn’t zoom in or add a perspective blur, but I was still able to get some really nice shots. Certainly any camera-enabled phone would do an equally good job.
When I returned to my Inbox this morning, my favorite roving panographer (if, in fact, there is such a term) had emailed to me his own stunning, low pixel image from a recent nature walk. Here is what Stanton Perry said about his photo, which was also taken with an iPhone, and its subsequent cartoon that uses our ToonIt! Photo plugin.
Interesting video of what goes into a high profile commercial photo shoot. In this case for Bebe, posted on Giulianobekor.com.
Very cool to see what the actual shots were and what the printed ad ended up being with all the compositing, color correction, and other assorted image processing. Oh, yeah, and the lions. Ya gotta have lions. Continue reading Commercials, lions, and manipulation
When we first start selling 3D Invigorator there were some questions about when you would ever need such a tool. But for designers it can give you some really interesting options without going into a 3D program. GoMediaZine, an online magazine for designers, recently had a tutorial on some very cool typographic effects. In the tutorial they use Cinema 4D, an excellent 3D program. However, they could have used 3D Invigorator.
Let’s talk about how. Here’s the original image for Gomediazine.com:
Here’s some 3D text I whipped up in 3D Invigorator in about 15 minutes:
Digital Anarchy recently posted a spankin’ brand new online ToonIt! Gallery. This web page is a great way to see what folks are doing with our Adobe Photoshop cartooning software.
ToonIt! is fun and easy to use and gives you amazing results when transmogrifying your photographs into cartoons. (Technical term per Calvin and Hobbs, a favorite real cartoon.) This is especially true when ‘tooning’ the human face and form, which most cartoon tools fail at. Ours doesn’t.
Most people send us exactly that, children and women turned into cartoons. A refreshing change comes from Stanton Perry of Rendertek.com. When I first saw Stanton’s work, which are all gorgeous panoramas and thus the nickname in this entry’s title, I was blown away by how well ToonIt! works with architectural and landscape settings.
Panorama #1, traditional toon.
In late April, one of my favorite publications ceased to exist. Only a week earlier, Studio Photography magazine had announced their partial rebranding as a source of news for location and studio as well as photography software, equipment and technique. I saw that info come in through their Facebook profile, in the form of a letter from their wonderful Editor, Diane Berkenfeld.
The former brand, Studio Photography.
From Diane’s letter: “As of this issue, Studio Photography’s name is changing to Studio & Location Photography, which better signifies the type of shooting you — our readers — do. We’ll still be featuring articles on the different niches of professional photography: wedding, portrait, event, commercial, photojournalism, schools and seniors, sports and more. However, since 67% of your shooting is done on location or outdoors, not in a studio, we wanted the magazine’s name to reflect that. We’ve also changed the magazine’s tagline from “The business behind the image” to “Inspiration • Technique • Business” which also more closely represents the magazine’s editorial.”
The new brand, Studio & Location Photography.
Great idea! More cool stuff. (Less about software, but that’s okay…) Continue reading First Studio Photography… now Studio Monthly.
In my mind, digital art first became looked upon as a medium in the early 90’s. I remember my art teachers in undergraduate school being grumbly and divided in terms of their acceptance of computer generated art being ‘real’ art. The old-time painters in particular hated computer graphics. Illustration teachers seemed more accepting because many were digitally generating their references or switching to a computer/hand rendered hybrid.
Those days are certainly very, very far behind us. I just read about a retrospective of Tim Burton, the well-known director and all-media artist, opening for five months at the New York Modern Museum of Art. Many painters and other traditional media artists have to wait for a posthumous show!
The 3D Invigorator is our newest Adobe Photoshop plugin for creating 3D logos and other fun 3D graphics. We’ve recently posted some great video tutorials that explain this powerful plugin. Watch new movies that explain the Material Editor, your one-stop shop for prettying up that 3D model, and its interesting texturing options for Textures and Bump Maps.
We have also added a movie that talks between working in 3D Invigorator’s environment vs. making use of Photoshop’s new 3D capabilities? The difference is pretty vast and we explain it all in this video tutorial.
Yes, it’s true. Terrorists have blown up the Golden Gate Bridge and Primatte and Final Cut Pro are to blame. The FBI says so. And so does the Onion.
So I’ve got to hand it to the folks at Professional Photography. They actually put together a newsletter that has content!
http://www.ppmag.com/web-exclusives/
I received three email newsletters today from photography magazines and/or web sites. Only the PP mag one had any actual content.
Continue reading Content vs. Ads In Photography Newslettersine marketing
I love when good art is enveloped by good promotional methods. (Note: All images shown here are borrowed from the respective websites.)
Awhile ago, YouTube linked me to the artist website www.philinthecircle.com. The artist is Phil Hansen aka Phil in the Circle. He’s a fascinating guy who paints/draws with unusual media, like a large scale portrait of Jimmy Hendrix made of colored matches or a Britney Spears portrait made from chewed up Starbucks pastries. He seems to make money in part on posters of the pieces. He burned much of the work in his themed series called Goodbye Art.
If you’re a photographer (or other content creator), one of your big concerns should be attaching your information to your photos. It’s pretty easy these days to pass photos around and for your photos to wind up in places you didn’t expect with no identifying info on them.
Luckily there’s a nifty tool in Photoshop to help you out with this. It’s called File Info. (under the File menu) The cool thing about this is that you can save your info as a template, which makes it easy to reapply the data to a large number of photos.
I always enjoy reading a breakdown of how the design process happens or where inspiration comes from. Some interesting sources are the Creative section of Communication Arts’ website; the Creativity blog on How magazine’s website; ideas from Moo.com‘s business card customers; and the illustration blogsite Drawn.ca.
Recently I designed a logo for our new CarToonIt! Bundle, which gives a discount on the purchase of ToonIt! Photo. This product bundle is our Adobe Photoshop cartooning software that now also works in Apple’s Aperture.
The CarToonIt! logo was pretty easy to make because I based it off our existing ToonIt! logo. But that short design process made me think about my design revisions for the ToonIt! logo, which happened over a few weeks’ time, and I thought it would be fun to post some of the iterations here. Enjoy!
My original concept sketch:
On Monday morning, I received a newsletter email from 3DScience.com. This is a stock graphics website that services the medical community. Sometimes I’ll start the day off at 9:00am with a fresh cup of coffee and a fresh digital image of heart surgery. Yum! This time, the company is serving up Swine Flu graphics, including a giveaway of 3D models of the virus.
Another thought about NAB, on the subject of streaming video across the web and other platforms. Companies were talking a lot about tying in with Microsoft Silverlight. This is a web browser plugin that plays video and other media content through the web browsers without requiring other plugins. Does that make sense? Basically, Silverlight is supposed to get around browser and file format related issues to make it easier for all of us to view content.
At least, I think that’s what Silverlight does. Have to laugh because when I went to Microsoft.com’s Silverlight section, the website couldn’t show me its content because I didn’t have Silverlight installed. Wouldn’t it be better if Microsoft showed me why I should WANT to install Silverlight before they require me to install Silverlight in order to read about it?
Our software company, Digital Anarchy, makes an annual mecca to NAB, which is the National Association of Broadcasters convention. The show is held in Las Vegas in late April, when it’s wonderful to stand outside at 2pm in the beating sun, then run back into the over-air conditioned show to dry off the small beads of sweat.
This was the first year since 2001 that Digital Anarchy was not a vendor at NAB. We sold our video/animation product line in August 2008 and are a Photoshop-only developer now. But we love the event and people, and it’s always cool to see new technology, so there we were. Drinking a little more than working, for once, often with colleagues from other plugin companies.
Representing below: Folks from ReVision FX, Digi Effects, Automatic Duck, Grid Iron, and Digital Anarchy.
Digital Anarchy has long been a fan of Artbeats.com stock footage. We have used their footage for demoing our products many times over our seven years of business. Recently I have also used the website iStockphoto.com. Mainly this is because Artbeats focuses on video footage, which our company used to use a lot of when we had video products. Now we are a Photoshop-centric company and need still images, and lots of ’em, to show what our products can do.
Usually I’m not a big fan of posting unrelated political stuff on blogs, but this is a bit of an exception. There is some EXCELLENT legislation in front of the Senate that prevents credit card companies from doing some of the more obnoxious practices they’ve developed over the years.
Please call your Senator and support this bill. If you have a credit card with a balance on it, this bill helps you.
Here’s a couple links to more infomation:
Consumer Union/Consumer Reports
A real story (and an example of what this bill is designed to prevent)…
Just read an article on one of my favorite industry news sites, www.studiodaily.com, which is related to Studio Monthly magazine. It’s about a new SciFi film that uses relatively low budget techniques to tell a story about the futurism of Mexico. The film is Sleep Dealer and the director is Alex Rivera.
I always enjoy reading about people’s hardware and software choices and moreso about their creative decisions. But what I really enjoyed about this article was the final interview question asked of Rivera.
Note: This movie still has been reposted from Studiodaily.com. Continue reading Find your inner freak.
Steven Parke is an amazing photographer and artist who Digital Anarchy became friendly with about two years ago. It’s taken almost that long for us to show his amazing work in our online gallery. Busy lives.
Steven is using Flickr as his gallery medium these days, though he used to show a wider expanse of his work in a gorgeous website called Imagecarnival.com. Seems like he has his creative fingers in lots of stuff including commercial portraits, musician photos, CD covers. If you click around his People set, you will see a lot of interesting and even recognizable people. Steven is quite humble about his accomplishments. One of my favorite photos in this set is the lead singer for a band called MILKSHAKE!.
One of my roles at Digital Anarchy is creating the web and print graphics. Whenever I tell someone that I do design collateral for a software company, if that person is not in technology, s/he almost immediately asks me to design a ‘small and easy’ site for free. (ps: no such animal) Either that or I am asked to help with his/her internet connection or email issues. Huh? This cartoon that I am reposting from the terrific Monstermunch.com says it all.
This topic of trying to get something for nothing — or asking the wrong person for help with a technology initiative — makes me think of a great article that I read yesterday called ‘What Price Pro for Hire?’ It came in through the e-newsletter from the magazine Videomaker.
Every time I write a manual for our company, I inevitably stumble upon the need to explain some basic terms. ‘Basic’ isn’t really the correct descriptor because it often implies that something is easy to understand.
For instance, this past week I was writing about a parameter in our ToonIt! Photo plugin. The control is called Lighter Type and the way to describe its Lighter1 option is to say that Lighter1 alters the ‘gamma’ of the source image. Well, I know that ‘gamma’ refers to colors but whew, I get completely lost after that.
A different kind of gamma.
In Photo Techniques magazine there was this quote attributed to Chuck Close:
“Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work.”
This sort of misses the point of inspiration. Obviously, you can’t stare at clouds all day, but that doesn’t mean you have to have your nose to the grindstone continuously either. I think a lot of inspiration is simply keeping your mind open and aware of what’s going on as you move through life. Inspiration doesn’t need to be lightning bolts and explotions. It can be simple things like ice cubes. Here’s a recent example of some macro shots I did:
One of the recurring topics that I’ve seen in recent years is that of copyright and what internet technologies mean to photographers. The challenges that photographers face are neatly illustrated in an article the Wall Street Journal published today.
Essentially the Obama Hope poster that was widely used, was created based on a photograph by Mannie Garcia that Sheppard Fairey found on the internet, used without permission, didn’t give credit to the photographer, and even refused to acknowledge the photograph when asked about it.
Here’s what we’re talking about:
I’m doing some product development for our ToonIt! Photo plugin, and wound up playing with some personal photos as source material. Looking at my cat is typically more interesting than iStock and this is a great photo to cartoon. The subjects’ faces are aimed at the viewer and their facial details are very clear. I also like that the background is blurred out in the original. We were photographed in my kitchen and those kinds of environments often don’t look all that interesting, even as a cartoon.
Here’s the result with the ToonIt! defaults rendered out of Photoshop:
Typically I try to blog about stuff related to photography, Photoshop, and all things graphical. But photography and graphics are all about workflow, and workflow is all about saving time and effort, so this article on Wired.com has peaked my interest. It’s called ‘Diary of a Self-Help Dropout: Flirting With the 4-Hour Workweek‘.
(above, image from the article) Written in a very humorous style, this article is about a freelance writer who has difficulty and some mild schizophrenia about managing all of his jobs and tasks. Sounds like…all of us.
Just spent two days hanging out at the PMA tradeshow. There were plenty of exhibitors (so the tradeshow may not be dead and gone yet), but there certainly weren’t any attendees. Occasionally I’d look around for tumbleweeds.
I guess I should have suspected this would be the case when I received no less than 6 emails from PMA over the last two weeks and one phone call begging me to sign up for a free exhibits badge. I can’t recall a tradeshow more earnestly trying to get someone, anyone to show up at their show.
I was just at WPPI (Wedding and Portrait Photographers) which had great attendance. So what’s wrong with PMA? Would love to hear from you all as to why you did or did not go. It’s definitely looking like a show we will no longer do. Judging from the exhibitors we talked to, it may be the last year for many of them as well.
But… was there anything interesting?
I have recently read articles about how two well-known software companies conduct their design and development processes. A mixed bag of ideas — just like product design itself — but the overall message is that the companies are innovative and open-minded in their approach to development, while still keeping a tight control over quality and standards. We’re talking about Apple and Google. Continue reading Good standards for good design.
This is sort of a followup to my Overpriced Schools For Design, Visual Effects, Photography, Whatever post about schools and going into debt getting an education.
There’s a good book out on the topic of student loans called the Student Loan Scam. Every student should read this before they go into debt for an education. As you can guess, it paints a somewhat unfavorable view of student loans… but there’s lots of good information in the book on how to get a loan and what to look for.
Obviously, there have been many people that have used student loans to great success. The problem starts to occur when you get private and technical colleges marketing themselves heavily and making impossible promises to impressionable 18-22 y.o. Continue reading Overpriced Schools part II
On the heels of my previous post,whenever I talk about cartoons online, I always have to mention my favorite online comic, xkcd, www.xkcd.com.
This web comic is self-described as ‘a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language’. It is also hysterically time-sucking so be careful if you click my link. XKCD also a great way to learn new geek words. So basically, this blog post of mine has absolutely nothing to do with Photoshop plugins, but it may help you to gain street cred with your IT or engineering department (or your 13 year old nephew who knows more than you).
For instance, look at the panel that was drawn for Valentine’s Day, titled ‘Sierpinski Valentine’:
Our company, Digital Anarchy, creates a terrific ‘toon’ product called Toonit! Photo. This Adobe Photoshop cartooning plugin lets you turn photographs into a cartoon look very easily and quickly, and generally without changing the default settings.
But suppose you want to make a cartoon the old fashioned way? By hand! Or rather, by hand in the computer. Well, there are a few websites that I’ve been hanging around for inspiration. They are Drawn!, Deviant Art and MyToons. Continue reading Cartoons! But not ours.
A picture can not lie. We all know the untruth of that these days. But what do you do when a picture isn’t lying, yet looks ‘obviously’ fake?
The below photo illustrates this to some degree:
This is a photo of a friend’s whale watching boat (Ultimate Whale Watch in Maui). Obviously, I shot this from a different boat while a whale swam up to and under the boat. I’m using a 70-200mm f2.8 lens, so I’ve got really narrow depth of field. As a consequence, the boat is razor sharp and everything else is pretty blurred.
If you saw the above image in a marketing brochure would you believe it?
As a developer for Photoshop (and now Aperture) I rarely spend time in other host graphics apps. There are other purchasable ones, like the Corel Painter Suite, but they generally don’t publish a good API that plugin developers like Digital Anarchy (that’s us) can hook into.
There are also a bunch of free image editing apps. For our customer model, they simply fall short of what Photoshop can do and none are widespread enough for us to support. Which makes sense since these free apps are not trying to be Photoshop, just act as an alternative for folks who aren’t doing graphics for a living and don’t want to invest money into graphic manipulation.
Having said that, I occasionally run into a summary list of free Photoshop alternatives. Thought it would be interesting to post a list that I found on Downloadsquad.com through a friend’s blog, pirandello.wordpress.com. Continue reading Photoshop free alternatives
There are a lot of review sites out there. http://www.dpreview.com is a good one… however, my favorite is http://www.slrgear.com.
In truth, they really only do lenses, but it’s an incredible site. The most in depth reviews of lenses you can imagine, including an interactive 3D graph showing you the focus profiles at any given aperture/focal length. It’s hugely entertaining to play around with the 3D graph and see where the sweet spot is for the lens and where it starts to really break down… as far as sharpness and vignetting goes.
For example, I’ve got the Canon 50mm 1.4 lens. You can see looking at the SLRgear graph that at 1.4, the lens really isn’t that great. But once you get to 2.0 and especially 2.8, it’s a great lens. It’s a good thing to check if you want to get the most out of your lenses.
Here’s a screenshot:
So an article discussing 2K vs. 4K images popped up on my radar today. It’s named ‘The Truth About 2K and 4K’ and is an interview with John Galt of panavision. It’s partially a marketing piece for Panavision, so take a grain of salt to some of the ‘truth’. On one hand he disparages the RED camera (panavision competitor) for not having a true 4K sensor (this is apprently true) and then later in the article he disparages IMAX (panavision competitor) for being 4K but that it doesn’t really matter because our eyes can normally only see 2K worth of detail. Uh… so that means RED actually got it right?
The jist of it is that RED, like Canon/Nikon DSLRs, uses a sensor with a Bayer mosaic pattern. Each spot (viewsite) on the sensor only receives one color (R, G, or B). 4 (Green gets counted twice) of those are added up to produce one pixel in your camera. Because of this, technically the image RED produces (and Canon and Nikon and…) is interpolated. The alternative is to have each spot on the sensor record all three colors at once. There is a GREAT comparison of the Canon 5D with the Sigma SD14 (which does use a sensor that captures all three colors on the same spot) and explains the difference between sensors very well:
http://www.ddisoftware.com/sd14-5d/
Between both articles it brings up some interesting questions for RED users and for digital photographers.
Yesterday was an exciting one as Digital Anarchy branched out into a new host application: the wild world of Aperture. Our Photoshop plugins ToonIt! Photo and Knoll Light Factory are now available for use in Aperture.
Our president, Jim Tierney, had the disadvantage of working on this product release remotely… from Hawaii. Here are some of his hard-earned Maui test shots for Knoll Light Factory.
His original shot:
The Knoll-infused version:
So in honor of the SuperBowl…
There are those of you who might own a relatively large telephoto and like sports. Usually, if you have a big lens attached to the camera, you’re not going to be allowed in, especially for big events. However, here’s a trick I’ve used to get my Canon 100-400mm lens into the BCS Title game, NFL Playoffs, and the NCAA tournament (among other things)…
Put a normal lens on the camera and put the telephoto lens in it’s case. Let someone else carry the camera in and you carry the lens in. If anyone asks about it… say it’s a binocular. The guys at the gate have no idea what a lens is unless it’s actually attached to the camera.
I’ve never been denied getting in.
Once in, it’s a little different story. You have to be somewhat stealthy about using it… especially if you have good seats. Where security along the sidelines can see you. I have been threatened with being kicked out if I didn’t stop using it. Dumbest move: had sideline seats at the 2006 BCS title game and got busted taking shots of warmups. They’ll give you a warning… but it made using it during the game a bit riskier because they’ve already seen you. So… don’t take shots of warmups or pregame crap. Nevertheless… got some good shots.
cheers,
Jim Tierney
http://www.digitalanarchy.com
https://digitalanarchy.com/blog
Greenscreens are cropping up all over the place.
I was in DC for the inauguration and in my hotel you could get a picture with President Obama pretty much any time. The trick to this was that they had a green screen set up and they’d composite you into a picture with the Prez. (or Joe Biden… but c’mon… how many people are going to go for Joe?). It was pretty entertaining to see people lined up to do this. It’s pretty cool to see how prevalent greenscreens are becoming.
Here’s some shots of the setup….
I love digital artwork — and it’s what pays the bills! — but it’s always wonderful to seek out non-digital artwork. Through Digital Anarchy, I look at a lot of artist websites and portfolios. They trickle in as email addresses attached to sales receipts or support requests, and I often click through to look at the URL.
This week I stumbled upon photos of some very unique and beautiful artwork. I don’t quite recall what series of clicks brought me here, but the artist is Jason de Caires Taylor and the site is www.underwatersculpture.com.
Images from the site:
I’ve been IM’ing today with industry friends about the Macworld keynote, or lack thereof. Most folks have been complaining that the announcements were lackluster. Which is true… but really, that’s like complaining the bus is late because of those darn passengers. ;) I don’t think that Apple CAN always wow us with new offerings. That development pace simply isn’t possible.
Frankly, as a small software company that’s been trying to keep up with their hardware and OS changes since OS X was birthed, whew, I’m glad Apple isn’t bringing out anything startlingly new right now. It’s nice that they have stopped ‘innovating’ for awhile and allowed us developers to create new products, instead of spending time recoding our older ones to work with the newest processor and platform changes.
heh, anyway….
Continue reading Macworld 2009 (I watched from home, just like you)
So I just got a calendar from Maxon (makers of Cinema 4D). Some really nice examples of 3D art using their software. As I looked at the images, I was struck by how some were really difficult to tell from photographs and some were obviously 3D. The difference, I think, is depth of field.
Depth of field was really noticable. On too many 3D images the DOF is infinite. Meaning that buildings 300 yards away are in razor sharp focus and you can see every detail on the bricks that make up the building. While the artist may want you to appreciate all the hard work he put in adding fine details… I don’t want to see them. I want them blurred out.
Digital Anarchy launched our newest product, ToonIt! Photo, just before Christmas. It’s a fun new Adobe Photoshop plugin that’s cartooning software for photos and other graphics.
Unfortunately, the ToonIt! manual took a week longer than the product release. It’s always the little stuff, like forgetting to plug in in the toaster, that trips me up. You can get the ToonIt! Photo manual from here. I apologize for the wait. Writing manuals is _almost_ as difficult as reading them.
Last month, Digital Anarchy had some difficulty with our server, store and site… shudder… and had to change vendors unexpectedly. I’ve been combing through our media ever since, trying to find content that didn’t properly survive the transition.
Which caused me to stumble upon one of my favorite artists in our Primatte Chromakey gallery. John Riley, Ph.D., is a physicist and associate professor who initially contacted Digital Anarchy about some graphics work for which he was using Primatte, an Adobe Photoshop plugin for blue/greenscreen masking.
Continue reading Rediscovered treasures: John Riley & Museo Nacional de Costa Rica
I was clicking around online yesterday, procrastin…er, doing some market research, when I came upon this interesting website, forensicphotoshop.blogspot.com.
I’ve read frequently on Adobe’s website that the medical slash science industry is a huge demographic of their Photoshop and Acrobat sales. (From the Adobe site, here’s an interesting white paper on the subject of Adobe and Foresnics.) At trade shows and socially, I have run into people who use Photoshop for cool stuff like the Genome project. But I’d never noticed a website devoted to a segment of the graphics industry that isn’t considered a creative market.
Until now. The author, Jim Hoerricks, rounds up a lot of Photoshop topics that are interesting in their own right, and moreso because they are referencing, to me, an emerging boutique part of the industry.
Continue reading Photoshop & fingerprints & forensics, oh my.
