Blast from the Past

Remember Polaroids? I sure do. There was nothing more exciting than waving a wet photograph in the air waiting for a picture to magically appear.
Unfortunately Polaroid doesn't make this film any more. However, you can still get the same look of these retro photographs. Rollip is a free online tool that will give you this nostalgic effect.
There's are several styles to pick from too! I was able to create a kewl effect and suddenly it was 1968 again! The best part (besides being FREE) I didn't have to worry about that sticky messy photo gluey stuff.


http://www.rollip.com/
Enjoy!

Amazing Jigsaw Puzzle Affect

Want to impress your friends with an amazing jigsaw puzzle affect on a favorite photo? Here is how you can do it.

Go to Adobe’s site to download their jigsaw action.
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&extid=1044043
This is an awesome Action, but it doesn’t pull out the pieces as shown in our example.

Running the Action

• Download the puzzle Action.
• Load the Action via the Action palette – click the little triangle on the upper right corner of the Action palette and select "Load Action".
• You'll see your new puzzle Actions available
• Select the option of 6 or 20 piece puzzle
• The Action will stop to allow you to adjust the bevel of the pieces and shadow. Make these adjustments and click continue to resume the Action.

The puzzle will be complete but the pieces will all be in place. If you like this look you can stop here.
If you’d like to pull individual pieces out like in our example follow these steps:

Moving the Pieces

• Change your background color to white
• Increase the size of your canvas (better to increase too much than not enough. You can crop later)
• Open your layers palette
• All the puzzle pieces will be in a folder called "Puzzle Set"
• Each puzzle piece will be on its own separate layer
• Select the puzzle piece you want to move and drag it outside the Puzzle Set folder (see below with puzzle piece A2)
• Unlock this layer by selecting your puzzle layer and clicking the lock in the bottom of the layers palette (see below)
• You can now move your puzzle piece to anywhere you wish
• I used the move then Rotate Tool (Edit - Transform - Rotate)
• Do this for each puzzle piece you want to move

Enjoy!

The very basics of great photographs

It's impossible to teach good photography or Photoshop in one simple lesson. However, I can run through the very basics of what's needed for a great photograph.

1. Shoot as high resolution as you can with your camera and get as high resolution camera as you can afford.
2. Get the lighting and exposure as close to perfect as you can, including white balance. If the lighting is poor, open blinds or turn on lights. Outside, move the subject if possible to a well lit area with indirect light (early and late day light is the BEST), use the flash and know the range of the flash.
   
3. Lock the focus - Hold your shutter button half way down, check your frame and finish pressing the shutter button.
4. Place your subject off-center or try a different angle other than eye level.
5. Always shoot in RAW and adjust your images as close as you can prior to processing to PSD.
6. Working file is PSD, all changes are done on layers, not on the image itself. Use adjustment layers not to damage original pixels.
   
7. From the PSD you save the sizes and formats you need but always keep a PSD backup file. Opening and resaving a jpg file degrades upon each save.
   

Example:
In the example below, natural light gives interesting soft shadows without the harsh shadows that direct sunlight would cause.
Instead of standing and taking the picture down at the subject, in this case, getting down to kitties level makes for a much more interesting photograph.

Save money on airline tickets

I'm sure you're familiar with sites like Priceline and Orbitz to get discounted airline tickets. Here is a neat site that lets you search several of these sites at once. It's called Yapta.
With Yapta, you search for tickets as usual. However, it can pull prices from different places. This includes sites like Orbitz, Expedia and Priceline.

There are also extensive filter controls. You can easily modify settings to get desired ticket prices. Yapta will even e-mail you when prices drop. What a great way to save time and money!
How handy is that?

Better way to create a new layer in Photoshop

You've created numerous new layers in Photoshop by clicking the New Layer Icon in the bottom of the layer palette. Now, let me show you the "make better" key trick.
Hold down the alt/opt key on your keyboard when selecting the New Layer Icon. Now you can quickly name your layer, set the opacity along with other options if desired.
This is much faster than going back later and properly naming your newly created layer. It also helps prevent you from forgetting to name your layer and ending up with generic Layer 1, Layer 2, etc. which can cause you a great deal of grief later when trying to manage your Photoshop file.
Enjoy the alt/option "make better" key when creating new layers!