JD Photo Imaging will hold a “Raw Image Processing and Adobe Lightroom” workshop Monday, August 2nd from 10am until 2pm at JD Photo Imaging on Corunna Road in Flint. Cost is $59 per person preregistration or $79 on the day of the workshop, which includes a catered lunch and $20 lab credit to test what you’ve learned. You can pre-pay by credit card or charge your lab account by calling 810-239-8671.

If you’ve ever wondered how to get the best color from your camera, or if you’re considering changing over to a RAW workflow, this class is for you.

During the class we will cover:

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It seems like every day we get a call from a customer who asks, “will file 1234.JPG look good as a 16×20 inch print?”

The simple answer is this: it depends. While some files are clearly too small to enlarge, others are in the “gray area” and might look good depending on the style you are trying achieve, and where the print will be displayed.

Here are the tricks we use inside the lab to help you answer this question. You can use them yourself, and in many cases make the decision before you place your order.

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I read an interesting article online entitled “The Lazy Rule of Thirds” by fashion photographer Jake Garn. He argues that the “rule of thirds” we’ve all been taught in photography is really just a shortcut to take photographs that follow the Golden Ratio.

Stick with me.

Over 2,500 years ago mathematicians figured out that if you drew a rectangle or a curve where the ratio of the height to the width was approximately 1.6, it just looked better. Without going into all the math, it turns out that nature uses this same ratio too: everything from flower petals to the branching of veins inside your body follows this pattern. Artists started using the Golden Ratio, and evidence of it is found in the Greek Parthanon, works by Leonardo Da Vinci, and even paintings by Salvador Dali.

Notice in the image above, if you draw a successive series of curves based on the Golden Ratio, the bigger rectangle on the left is approximately two-thirds of the total area. The logic is that instead of trying to teach us knuckleheads the Golden Ratio in Beginning Photography 101 class, the teachers simplified it into the Rule of Thirds.

Think this doesn’t work? After I read Jake’s article, I found a transparent .PNG file of the curve online (you don’t even want to know why it is called the Fibonacci spiral), copied it to my desktop, and opened it in Photoshop. Then I found a really nice image done by the folks over at Classic Concepts Studio in Durand, and dragged the curve on top of the image as a new layer. I resized the spiral by dragging the corner with the shift key held down so it wouldn’t lose proportion, rotated it, mirrored it, and colored it with a red stroke.

This is the result.

I always knew I really liked this image, but I never knew why. Now I’m going back over other images and dropping the spiral on top. I can’t say every good image matches perfectly, but I can say that the bad ones don’t even come close.

If I were making an image for a competition, I’d have this spiral file saved on my hard drive and use it to help me with composition and cropping. It might just be the secret ingredient I needed to create the perfect award-winning image.

Do you have any images to share that match up with the Golden Ratio? Send them to me as a 250×200px 72dpi JPG and I’ll post them here.

Adobe Photoshop is the standard in our industry. Installing your first full-retail version will give you a feeling of pride almost as big as your first professional camera.

That’s why it is important that when you start using Photoshop, you don’t commit either of the two biggest mistakes most new users make:

1. Wrong DPI. When you click File -> New in Photoshop, by default your image is set at 72dpi (dots per inch). New photographers typically set a height and width in inches, then ignore the dpi.

For 99% of the work you do, you should set Photoshop to 300dpi first, then enter a height and width. For images that will end up as banners, you can set Photoshop to 150dpi, since this is the resolution of most large-format inkjet printers like the 52″ one we use to create wall graphics.

2. Wrong JPG Quality. When you save a final image for printing in Photoshop as a JPG file, by default Photoshop chooses 6 (medium) for image quality. This should always be moved to 12. In addition, if you are saving a copy that you plan to work on again later, you should save the image as a .PSD file. Only your final image that you plan to send to us should be saved as a JPG.

Making both these changes will result in very large files, which is why you should have a PC with lots of RAM (3-4Gb is a good start for PCs), but it will also insure that your images look their best when they are printed.

Drop shadows are one of the easiest to use and most powerful ways to make text stand out on a page. They are especially useful when you need to set dark text on a dark image. Just add a light drop shadow, and your text will immediately pop.

However, used improperly, drop shadows can also cause problems with your layouts. The biggest problem we see at the lab is drop shadows that extend off the edge of an image, which result in a hard edge when printed.

Look at the first two examples on the right.

1. In the first example, the tight drop shadow will print properly, but because it is dark it tends to make the text look muddy.
2. In the second example, the drop shadow is much more attractive, but when it is printed, the right edge of the shadow will have a hard edge, ruining the drop shadow effect.

How to solve the problem?

1. Make your drop shadow small and tight to the text by minimizing the spread, size and distance (in Photoshop), and instead lower the opacity to make the shadow appear softer. See JD Photo #3 as an example.
2. If you need a large drop shadow, move the text away from the image edges as shown by JD Photo #4. The easiest way is to drop down 1-2 font sizes, for example, from 24 point to 22 or even 20 point text. If the text looks too small, raise it back up, use a smaller drop shadow, and lower the opacity.

Have you ever wanted an easy way to visualize a headline in many different fonts at the same time to see which one you like better?

You need to check out a utility called the Font Thing.

Despite its strange name, The Font Thing does one thing incredibly well. It lets you organize all your TrueType fonts (Windows only - sorry Apple) into collections based on font type. For example, I’ve group all my fonts as:

• San Serif
• Modern
• Script
• Stereotypes (funny fonts)
• Symbols
• Times

Now, whenever I want to compare the look of a headline in say, Avant Garde versus Futura, I click the Collections tab on the upper left, click Modern, type my headline on the right, and click the Multiple tab to see the headline in both (or all) of the selected fonts.

When I need to mix text and images in Photoshop, the Font Thing is always open in the background (if you don’t want to jump back and forth, just use it to print out all your similar fonts on the same page). Give it a try, and see if it doesn’t become one of your most valuable utilties.

David over at The News in Print has compiled a list of 21 free and paid alternatives to Adobe Photoshop. It is a good list, although it is still missing some of the alternatives like Picassa, openCanvas, ArtWeaver, ArtRage, Alias Sketchbook, Corel Painter, Expression Studio, Xara Extreme and the perennial favorite, Photoshop Express.

Which begs the question: with so many alternatives to Photoshop available, why would anyone pay the $500+ and continual upgrade fees to use Photoshop? Here are the bottom-line reasons:

• It is the industry standard. I can send a graphics designer a layered PSD file and 99% of the time no additional instructions are required
• Support includes thousands of books, videos, tutorials, brushes and scripts.
• You can ask any pro graphics designer or photographer how to accomplish a task and they will be able to show you on either of your computers
• One common file format for both PC and Mac

But perhaps the most important reason is that if you’re a professional photographer, you should be using professional tools. In the same way that you wouldn’t use a no-name consumer camera to photograph a wedding, you shouldn’t use an image editing program that hasn’t been tested by thousands of pros like yourself.

Having a high-powered PC or Mac that boots up the latest version of Photoshop (that you know how to use) shows your clients, your staff, your peers (and even yourself) that you are a professional deserving of professional prices for their services.

With the huge growth in high-speed Internet connections, there are now virtually thousands of free on-line tutorials to teach Photoshop. After having reviewed several of them, below are some recommendations:

-If you are brand new to Photoshop, you should start with a class that starts with the basics like menu options and keyboard shortcuts and builds step-by-step into using Photoshop for everyday tasks. A good example of this training can be found at www.lynda.com. They have hundreds of Photoshop training videos broken into 5-7 minute downloads. Many of the basic videos are free - if you want to see videos that are more advanced, a membership ($25 per month) is required.

-A slightly more expensive alternative is to use Adobe’s official online training at adobe.elementk.com. For $129 you get a year’s worth of access to over 30 courses in Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and GoLive. Adobe has partnered with ElementK (the top supplier of online education to Fortune 500 companies) to produce these videos, so you can be assured of their quality.

-If you already know your way around Photoshop and are looking for a specific advanced technique, go to www.tutorialized.com or www.pslover.com. Both of these sites are collections of thousands of free tutorials submitted by Photoshop professionals. These sites assume you have a good working knowledge of Photoshop and are just looking for a “trick” to accomplish a specific special effect.

UPDATE: Siyab over at listfied.com created a list of 75+ advanced techniques for Adobe PhotoShop and Adobe Illustrator. Check them out. If their is anything here you’ve always wanted to do, click on the technique an in 5 minutes you’ll have a new skill.

Adobe recently introduced PhotoShop Express, an on-line image-editing program. PhotoShop Express is designed to compete with Google’s Picassa and Shutterfly’s Picnik: two free, yet powerful image-editing programs used by millions of beginning photographers in the consumer market. Since young photographers grow up to become professional photographers, PhotoShop needed a product like Express to maintain relevancy to the next generation.

The PhotoShop Express beta is also a test to see if a single browser-based program could replace both PhotoShop CS3 and the $99 Elements. The plan would be to offer basic photo-editing for free, then encourage users to purchase a subscription to enable premium features. Many future programs (including the next versions of Microsoft Vista and Office) are slated to be totally browser-based. Adobe must certainly be considering this option too as it develops CS4, CS5, and CS6.

Here’s the question: will PhotoShop Express (and the subscription-based model) work for professional photographers? On the one hand, I like the idea of only paying for the functionality I need. On the other hand, I like holding the program CD in my hand. With the CD, I can postpone purchasing the latest upgrade until I’ve got the free time to learn the new features and where they are on the new menus. I don’t want Adobe forcing me to update in the middle of an important project.

It will be interesting to see how the software as a subscription model plays out. I’m willing to keep an open mind, but my gut reaction is that I’m not going to be happy about it.