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I just returned from San Francisco, which I believe is one of the most photogenic cities in the world. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much time to shoot since I was at Macworld most of the time.

However, one morning a friend and I took the early bus to Treasure Island. I have been out there many times, but never as the sun was rising and I wanted to see that.

My point in going was to get a nice skyline photo so I could try the new “Auto-Align” and “Auto-Blend” features in Photoshop CS3. Even though my hands were shaking in the cold and a huge ship tried to block my view, I was able to take a few shots as the sun was rising.

When I got back to my computer, I opened up Photoshop CS3 to stitch together the shots. I couldn’t believe how easy it is to do it. It was really just three steps.

1) Open all the photos to the same project.
2) Select all layers and choose “Auto-Align”
3) Choose “Auto-Blend”

That is seriously all that I did and I was amazed at how well the photos were stitched. Even with the morning sky being list from left to right, the blending was good.

You can see my photo below: (click to enlarge)

Also, my friend took a nice panorama while he was in line for the keynote. He also used CS3 to stitch the photos.

A couple days ago I offered a Photoshop action to make the color in your photos pop, I received a few emails asking how to load these actions. Since I plan to release more actions in the future, I thought it would be a good idea to get up a quick tutorial. It’s really a simple process.

Just find the “Actions” palette and look for the little circle with the arrow in it. Click that button and you’ll get a drop down menu. From there find “Load Actions” It will prompt you asking where the action is located. Just find it and presto.

One of my favorite Flickr groups is the Technique Group. There are so many talented people there that offer up their tips.

One of the great discussions is one called “Tutorial: Make Your Colors Pop.” The flickr user macaddict offers a great tutorial on bringing out the colors of your photo. It basically consists of changing the mode to “Lab Color”, making some changes for the a, b, and Lightness channels, then switching the mode back to RGB. It sounds simple, but there are some great results. To see the tutorial and see some examples, head to the Flickr Discussion.

After playing with it for a while, I finally determined just the right settings for my photos. I then created a Photoshop Action for me to use in the future. Just in case some of you would like to give it a try, I’ll make it available for you too. Just download it and install the action from your Actions pallette in Photoshop. You can download it here.

Here is one example. First is original, second is “popped”.

I dropped in on PhosthopWorld, but I must have missed the sneak peek that was given of Photoshop CS3. According to this AppleInsider post:

“During the Photoshop World keynote, Adobe’s Sr. Vice President of Creative Solutions provided a quick look at Photoshop CS3, apparently running on an Intel-based Mac,” PiperJaffray analyst Gene Munster wrote in a note to clients on Monday.

“While the presentation did not reveal any of the CS3 features, it provided evidence that the company has already successfully moved this core application to the Intel-Mac platform.”

CS3 isn’t set for release until Spring 2007. That’s a bummer. CS2 runs alright on my Intel machines, but I’d sure love to have a Universal Binary version.

A while back, the good folks at CompleteDigitalPhotography.com offered some very useful Automator Actions For Photoshop. Well, now they’ve added to the collection with some Automator Actions For Photoshop Elements.

These are quite useful for Photoshop Elements. From the Developer’s Site:

As all Photoshop Elements users know, the Actions Palette is one of the things that separates Elements from Photoshop CS2. Or rather, the lack of an Actions palette is what separates Elements from CS2. Photoshop Elements has no scripting facilities of any kind - no Actions palette within the program, and no scripting support for AppleScript or JavaScript. However, now with Automator and the Photoshop Elements Action Pack, you can finally automate Elements, to batch process your images.

A while back, I learned about tilt-shift photography. It “is an artistic technique where the lens is tilted and shifted relative to the attached camera.” I’ve never tried it in real life, but I have used a tutorial on how to fake it in photography and it is great. One of the most interesting things that can be done is making a a real city look like a mini city. For example:

Here is a picture I took while in Bern, Switzerland:

After applying the tilt-shift technique (and doing a little cropping) it looks like this:

It’s really not a hard thing to do, but it does take some practice. I found that it is best to take the photo looking down on teh city or the scene. Also, have good hard lighting with shadows.

Here is the tutorial: Fake Model Photography
Here is a great Flickr Group with tons of examples: Tilt-Shift Miniature fakes

If you find any really good ones, leave a link in the comments so the rest of us can check them out.

I mentioned earlier that I was going to be attending Photoshop World in Las Vegas.

Well, I went down there yesterday and it sum it up…I was a little bummed. I strolled thru the Expo and it didn’t take very long. I brought my camera, bu failed to find anything picture worthy. I was surprised at how small it was. It took up one corner of one convention hall at the Mandalay Bay. I think one of the big draws for conventions in the past were the good deals that some distributors would offer. But, with the internet, that is now obsolete. I could match any of the prices they had there online at any time.

The big names were there. Peachpit, Canon, Adobe, Epson, etc. But, the booths seemed to entail little effort. Maybe everyone is focusing on Photokina 2006.

I will say this though. They did have few theaters set up with people giving demonstrations. The man showing Portrait Tips in Photoshop was really good. Microsoft was giving a preview of Vista but there were only two people watching that demonstration. The whole place was swarming with Powerbooks and iMacs.

In one of the Flickr groups that I follow, a kind fellow wrote a script to fake the LOMO look in Photoshop. If you haven’t heard of Lomography, it was essentially digital photography before digital photography. Fun, every-day, oversaturated pictures. This type of photo has quite a following. In fact, it has it’s own international society.

I had a little fun with the free Photoshop script. If you’d like to try it out, grab it in this Flickr group discussion.

Recently I had a younger cousin ask me about Photoshop and how to use it. It made me think of he first time I fired up Photoshop and how intimidating it looked. Tools, Palettes and Settings. Oh my.

If you are just learning the different tools available in Photoshop (or constantly need to refresh your memory like I do), the Photoshop Toolbox Reference will be a good place to start. You can select any of the tools and watch a short clip on how to use it and what it does.

I love black and white photos. They succeed at pulling out details that you could have missed otherwise.

This morning I read a wonderful tutorial on the Digital Photography School Blog. This tutorial taught five different ways for you to create Black and White photos. The first one is using the in camera filter, which I tend to steer away from. The last four examples are post processing methods and all four offer good tips. Personally, I prefer the “Lab Color Method”, which is example number four.

If you’d like to learn the five techniques, you can read them here.