A Blog on probably just about anything but mostly Photoshop.
An Old dog and new tricks
Posted 11-14-2007 at 08:18 AM by cricket1961
I don't proclaim to know everything about Photoshop. A lot, sometimes a very lot. Katrin Eismann describes me as someone who breaks Photoshop to make it work better. Which is really not far from the truth. It is how I taught myself Photoshop.
But I don't think that using something built to do one thing is meant to ONLY do that one thing. For instance, how many of you use H/L to create masks? Or even a black and white image?
What I am getting at and have strayed from is that I can go for years and not "learn" anything useful with Photoshop. And by useful I mean Productive (I am not discounting great effects and such).
But I learned something yesterday that really will change the way I work. Thanks to Markeeza and a comment he made in one of the forums. He mentioned something about smart objects, which I use a lot, that had never occurred to me. And going back, I checked and it works in CS2 as well as CS3.
Mark, I don't think you as yet realize what this means fully. And it may because we use Photoshop differently maybe not. But it definitely comes down to using something different from what it is intended.
In the early 90's I worked with some brothers, the Kruger brothers to be exact. Didn't physically work with them, just was a beta man for them and all around pain. They owned a company called Fauve. They had a art program that worked like Painter called Fauve Matissé. But it was only for the PC side and not Mac. They decided to take on Adobe Photoshop and created a program called xRes. Even the key commands were identical. But it did SO much more. It worked more like Live Picture and Photoshop combined. Each layer could have its own set of channels, up to something like 64. And each layer in the document could have its OWN COLOR SPACE. Something no other program could do.
But now Photoshop does and can.
I am in heaven at the moment. Don't know when I will be back again.
Cheers!
Chris
But I don't think that using something built to do one thing is meant to ONLY do that one thing. For instance, how many of you use H/L to create masks? Or even a black and white image?
What I am getting at and have strayed from is that I can go for years and not "learn" anything useful with Photoshop. And by useful I mean Productive (I am not discounting great effects and such).
But I learned something yesterday that really will change the way I work. Thanks to Markeeza and a comment he made in one of the forums. He mentioned something about smart objects, which I use a lot, that had never occurred to me. And going back, I checked and it works in CS2 as well as CS3.
Mark, I don't think you as yet realize what this means fully. And it may because we use Photoshop differently maybe not. But it definitely comes down to using something different from what it is intended.
In the early 90's I worked with some brothers, the Kruger brothers to be exact. Didn't physically work with them, just was a beta man for them and all around pain. They owned a company called Fauve. They had a art program that worked like Painter called Fauve Matissé. But it was only for the PC side and not Mac. They decided to take on Adobe Photoshop and created a program called xRes. Even the key commands were identical. But it did SO much more. It worked more like Live Picture and Photoshop combined. Each layer could have its own set of channels, up to something like 64. And each layer in the document could have its OWN COLOR SPACE. Something no other program could do.
But now Photoshop does and can.
I am in heaven at the moment. Don't know when I will be back again.
Cheers!
Chris
Total Comments 5
Comments
 | Awesome Chris! Now write that book on it you mentioned. :P |
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| | it'll be interesting to see what you make from this...what is H/L btw? |
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| | H/L is Highlight/Shadow in Photoshop. |
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| | Hello Chris- Thankyou. We may not be not be all that different in our workflows Chris - I do high end retouching as well as visualising in London. I have worked in high end fashion as well as packaging, food and cars. I find that for visualising, illustration and fast compositing Smart Objects are a big benefit in many different ways, and thats how I got into them. But they do have their uses in the world of fashion/beauty too - not just the use of different color spaces embedded in a single document, as I pointed out in the other thread. I'll give one another example where I use them - Resolution - i sometimes use "placeholder" Smart Objects to use lower res version of composited/placed elements. Only the Smart Object Preview is held in RAM. It effectively means you can do all your retouching, including dodge,burn whatever, on a lower res version of your final image for massive performance boosts. |
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| | Hi mark Thanks for the tip. This was probably the first thing that I realized with the knowledge that you could change color space with smart objects. Lateral thinking is what keeps me going and once I realized and tried the different resolution was when I got really excited. File size still grows but it is worth it. This does not help for most of my higher end skin work, but for a lot of things it is indispensable I think. |
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