Adobe has outlined its plans to offer two versions of Photoshop CS3 when it is released later this year. In addition to the standard edition, imaging professionals and enthusiasts will have the option of a yet more comprehensive tool in the form of an extended version. This is said to build on the already bulging feature set by adding 3-D and motion graphics oriented capabilities as well as allowing image measurement and analysis. Adobe say they are aiming to simplify imaging in the architectural, engineering, medical and scientific industries whilst continuing to cater to their core following of graphic and multimedia artists.

SD Memory, JPEG files, Mirrors, ISO… All these terms can be so encumbering. I’m here to make all this easier for you. Today, My lesson is on Mega-Pixels. Now I know what your thinking, and I’m not going to get super technical. I want this to be easy, so next time you go shopping you’re a little more educated, and can’t get lied to at the store.

A mega-pixel is 1 million pixels. Pixels are the dots that make up an image. Most 640 x 480 monitors are .3 mega-pixels. The average computer is 800 x 600, or 1024 x 768. Shocking to think most cameras have up to 10 mega-pixels. Now on those lines, the higher quality you get, the bigger image you can make. 5.2 mega-pixels can take a picture of 2560 x 2048, which is rather large.

Consider this when purchasing a digital. If you don’t need that many mega-pixels, DON’T BUY THEM. I know, all the guys just groaned because power is excellent. While I agree, you can really get into the thousands with just mega-pixels alone. If you’re not a super photographer, consider 3 mega-pixels.

Also, remember to ask about the image sensors. They control the blurriness of the pixels. They are meant to make the picture blur a bit, and make it flow a little more. That’s not always a good thing. You want the camera to be as close to natural light as possible.

Hopefully this was easy and education. Until next time!

An Adobe competitor to Aperture?

Adobe® Lightroom™ Beta is the efficient new way for professional photographers to import, select, develop, and showcase large volumes of digital images. So you can spend less time sorting and refining photographs, and more time actually shooting them. Its clean, elegant interface literally steps out of the way and lets you quickly view and work with the images you shot today, as well as the thousands of images that you will shoot over the course of your career. Because no two photographers work alike, Adobe Lightroom adapts to your workflow, not the other way around.

The Beta is mac only at this point - which is strange considering Adobe trend to go Windows first when competing with Apple products - but at least this is something I can actually run on my 1GHz Powerbook…

Visit the Adobe® Lightroom™ Beta Site and download the Mac OSX Beta.

Over on Ask MetaFilter, when gregchttm asked “What tricks separate a Photoshop/Illustrator newbie from a master?”, I expected a bunch of snarky comments like “Ever heard of Google?” or “Go pick up a book already!” But he didn’t get those kinds of answers; what he received instead was a whole bunch of great responses ranging from handy keyboard shortcuts to suggestions for not-as-well-known Photoshop tutorial books.

There’s too much excellent advice in that thread to post here, so head over there and see if there’s some neat little trick that you didn’t know about before.

I’m always amazed when I see a gallery of “before & after” photos from fashion photographers. I spend a lot of time in PhotoShop, but I’m not sure I could pull this off. How do they change the hair? Does PhotoShop have a magic hair tool I don’t know about?

From Conrad’s site:

This next Paul Mitchell image was pretty demanding as EVERYTHING needed work. I had to create hair where there was none which is often quite a feat when you don’t have a similar image to pull from. Her legs were in need of some smoothing(dare I say excerise) and the overall image needed some attitude. Not a HUGE difference from the original, but once the cast was removed and the problem areas dealt with, we had ourselves a wonderful little image.

Check out the gallery at Conrad Digital.

Derek, a friend of mine and reader of ilikecameras, visited the Greek Isles recently and came back with his first few rolls of film from his new film-SLR. Unfortunately transferring the frames to digital has proved frustrating and ultimately disappointing. Firstly the photo-lab did a poor job, even going so far wrong as to scratch some of the slides. This is all too common with you drug-store photo labs and while they may be cheap one should try not to use them for developing slide film. The second problem has been scanning the prints and getting them into a digital format. At home one would ideally have a dedicated slide-scanner or a flat-bed scanner with a slide attachment. When push comes to shove though and your mother-in-law is screaming to see holiday photos of her grandson one has to resort to flat-bed scanning the prints themselves.

So Derek scanned them in but the results are poor. Flat, lifeless colours, scratches and noise along with jagged borders and low detail. He asked me if there is anything one can do to pep the photos up. I took a look and saw that it would take some serious Photoshop skills to get much out of the photographs.

Whipping out the pen and tablet and spending 5 to 10 hours on a single photograph though would not help my friend at all. He has many photographs and all need some work after being scanned in. So I thought I would take the middle-road and stick to easy-to-use Photoshop tools (ones that other applications will have too) and, while not being able to fully-restore them, at least show Derek how to breathe some life back into your holiday shots. The dragon-in-law will hopefully be appeased.
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Inevitably you are asked; How did you take that photo? Whether you are a pro-photographer or an enthusiast people will always be fascinated by what they see as an amazing photograph.

Thankfully we are not magicians. We don’t have to hide our techniques behind a code of honour and revealing our techniques will not get us banned from the brotherhood of photographers. More importantly even the greatest photograph is not magic.

So we here at ilikecameras are going to show you what goes into a photograph. Every now and then we will pick a photograph and find out how it was taken, what was done to it and all the other variables that made it what it is. This will range from time, place and date to camera gear and settings used through to darkroom (digital or physical) techniques. Aperture, shutter, ISO, lens, camera body, Photoshop layers and more.

If you see a photograph you want to know more about then email it to one of us and we will do our best. Please include as much info about the photographer as you can so that we can easily get in touch with them. Naturally not all photographers are keen to reveal their secrets so don’t be disappointed if we can’t tell you how a masterpiece was made. Also try not to send in photographs by Ansel Adams or Henri Cartier-Bresson as they are not likely going to respond to our emails.

To get the ball rolling I am going to use one of my photographs to which Orange Bread asked Do you think you can show us the original shot?

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