smart

Hey Gang. Today I make up for my outrageous post from last week with a classic retouching technique. One in which I take a photograph of a lovely woman and make her skin look wonderfully, reasonably, and altogether realistically smooth.

Here's the official description from lynda.com: Read more » 

This week, I and my beloved video publisher lynda.com have a special treat for you: I show you how to create a galaxy of stars, solar flare, and space gas from nothing more than a layer of black pixels. And you can customize it for print, for the web, whatever you want. In just 9 minutes and 1 extra-quick second, you can Big Bang in Photoshop. Read more » 

About a dozen years ago, I engaged in the only cosmetic surgery of my life (so far!), LASIK. It corrected my far vision. But now that my aging crystalline lens is as impliable as a piece of beef jerky, I require reading glasses. And there's not a thing Photoshop can do about it.

Photoshop is similarly incapable of correcting a photograph that was captured or digitized out of focus. Consider the following examples. In the first, the image is simulated to be out of focus using Photoshop's powerful (but not Top 40) Lens Blur filter. In the second, I slather on a heaping helping of the Smart Sharpen filter with little evidence of positive transformation, not to mention lots of clipped highlights and shadows.

Compare that to the same image as it was actually captured by Jason Stitt of the Fotolia image library. With accurate focus at its disposal, the Smart Sharpen filter is capable of rendering tactile detail, even with a tiny Radius value (the number after the slash below).

Read more » 

Do me a brief favor and ignore this feature's name. Smart objects aren't all that smart. And they aren't objects. In other words, smart objects aren't "smart objects."

What "smart objects" are is envelopes. The kind that hold things. And keep them safe. Place an image or vector file into one of these envelopes, and nothing you do can cause that file harm. Which means you can apply nondestructive transformations, nondestructive filters, nondestructive everything. The world is your pixel-based oyster. Read more »