Getting The Shot

I recently shot the family holiday photo and asked if anyone would be interested in a breakdown on how the shot was captured. Below you’ll find the list of items I mentioned in the video that may be helpful for you in your shot planning. Thanks for watching.

Dazne Light Kit*

Stella Pro CLX 10*

A-Clamps*

Platypod*

Gels*

*Affiliate link used. Affiliate links allow me to earn a small commission as a content creator if you purchase items using the affiliate link. Thank you for your support.

Photoshop on the Web? Yes Please: Adobe Max 2021 Announcements

Happy Adobe Max Day, everyone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I come off as a huge fanboy. So be it. I like what I like and the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription* works for me for most things I do in my day-to-day professional life. With that said, Adobe began its annual conference aimed to educate and inspire the content creators of the world. The keynote presentation is always noteworthy with some big updates to its software offerings. Let’s take a look at those new updates.


Photoshop Is Pretty Much Everywhere

The Adobe Sensei AI engine continues to improve as it will offer more tools to help speed up the photo post-processing workflow with just a few clicks. Creating selections in Photoshop gets easier as you can now hover over objects and preview what a selection would be in your artwork. There’s also more neural filters in place to help with enhancing landscape images beyond sky replacements. Lightroom also gets some new AI love. What excites me the most is a forth-coming (beta) Photoshop web interface with the help of a more collaborative Creative Cloud. This is all about speeding up the collaboration process as well as aid in helping train up someone you’re mentoring. Collaborators can use the browser to do some basic editing or provide feedback to the artist. No Creative Cloud account required for the collaborator. More on this beta and other photography app updates is available here on the Adobe blog.

Image: Adobe

Slick Update for Vloggers in Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro has had a few updates earlier in the year pointing towards performance and useful tools for your final video composition. Let’s face it, video is becoming more and more prominent the world of communication and branding. Platforms like YouTube and TikTok will favor your videos if you have certain behind-the-scenes elements in place with your workflow in addition to creating captivating stories to keep your viewers on their platform. Vloggers and film makers will love the updates. As a vlogger wanting to have music bed in their video, but the music track doesn’t quite match the length of the video. It’s a horrible experience to try to tastefully trim music to a video with cuts and trimming of the audio track. Now audio remix, which is found in Adobe Audition, is available in Premiere Pro. This is a great tool in Audition. Good news is this is coming to Premiere Pro. Bad news is this is a beta release.

Image: Adobe

Another useful update is the “simplified timeline” AI that’s available in Premiere Pro. This is yet another tool aimed at making collaboration more efficient. For some, a video sequence timeline can become quite messy when piecing together tracks, effects and markers. If the project is a team project, it may be helpful to minimize all the extraneous markers and layers when a collaborator is reviewing the sequence. Simplified Timeline does just that without destroying the project. This feature is available in the new update. More on the video updates from Adobe can be found here.

There are other updates available to the Creative Cloud suite this week. In Design, Illustrator, Character Animator and more received updates. I didn’t get into them all because, I don’t use those apps as often. But if you’re interested, more news on the all the Adobe updates can be found here on the Adobe blog.

Did you sign up for Adobe Max? I hope so. It’s FREE and full of information to help you better understand some creative concepts and fundamentals, as well as get a better grip on the Creative Cloud suite of apps.

(*) Affiliate link used. When you use my affiliate links, I receive a small commission from your purchase at no additional cost to you as the consumer. Thank you for your support




ProRAW and More Coming to Photoshop for iPad

Photoshop on iPad has been a DREAM for many photographers and creative artists for years, now. It’s now available on iPad, but it’s not quite everything you’d have on an actual laptop or desktop computer. Adobe knows this and has been working at getting the experience closer to the laptop or desktop experience. Adobe shared a sneak peak of another feature coming to the Photoshop for iPad app in the video below. If you’re interested in getting these great photography tools for yourself, I have an affiliate link here for pricing starting at $10/month.

New Photoshop Updates for Desktop and iPad Announced

Adobe has announced new updates to its popular photo editing and manipulation software, Photoshop. The popular app continues grow as more and more tools and options are integrated with each update. Today’s update is great for photographers shooting landscape images or outside in general as the Adobe Sensei AI continues to get better. Here are some of the updates of note for both Photoshop on the desktop computer as well as the iPad.

Sky replacement AI updated

Image: Adobe

Image: Adobe

We’ve all been there. We’ve snapped a photo outside and the sky just looks. . .blah. Sky replacement AI has gotten more and more popular for this reason. With the latest update to Photoshop's sky replacement feature, you can now choose from more skies in your replacement, import up to 5,000 skies, and control how the newly replaced sky is applied.

Image: Adobe

Image: Adobe

AI is the big key to the Neural Filters of Photoshop, too. Adobe has included some improvements and updates for this feature set which includes:

  • Preset images now included for Style Transfer to provide a starting point

  • Use any custom and apply the style of that image to your document

  • Superzoom now operates on the entire layer instead fo only a cropped area of the image.

In addition to the sky replacement updates, Adobe announced more control over its Transform Warp tool. this is useful for allowing graphic designers the ability to create complex shapes within their project with the implementation of Bezier handles. For those of you interested in providing feedback for future Photoshop features or suggestions, you can be a part of Photoshop Beta. Just install the beta app via your Creative Cloud app running on your computer.


Photoshop on iPad updated

The iPad version of Photoshop has two nice updates that’s currently found in the desktop version. The Healing Brush and Magic Wand. Healing is great for retouching, small spot removal and so forth in photo manipulation. I use it regularly in portraits. The Magic Wand is great for quick selections of objects in your photo.

Image: Adobe

Image: Adobe

These are nice features to be added to Photoshop on iPad. I still think there’s a little ways to go before I can make it my mobile photo manipulation app, but it’s nice to see the improvement happening for the project.

You can find out more about the latest Photoshop updates (and MORE) via the Adobe blog post right here. And if you’re interested in getting Photoshop and Lightroom for yourself, click here and get it for $9.99 per month. A great value, in my opinion.



*Affiliate link used. Affiliate links allow me to earn a small commission as a content creator if you purchase items using the affiliate link. Thank you for your support.



Adobe Continues Performance Boost for M1 Macs

Coming off the heels of WWDC, Adobe announces more updates for its Creative Cloud product line. Specifically, those compatible with the Apple M1 silicon. A lot of the products have been supported for a little while with others still being in beta status, but today some performance updates were announced.

What's New Capture.png

Performance Boosted

Adobe teamed up with Pheiffer Report to take a look at performance of the Creative Cloud apps running on M1 Macs from Apple. The test hardware included the M1 Macbook Pro (16GB RAM), Intel Core i5 Macbook Pro (16GB RAM) where both were connected to an Apple Pro Display XDR. Lots of benchmarking test were completed looking at Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and more focusing on not only the simple use of the user interface (UI), but also some graphic-heavy or CPU-intensive functions of each app. It’s found that on average, the Creative Cloud apps are 80% faster using the M1 systems. Pretty impressive. Adobe and Pheiffer had a bunch of charts and information here showing all the details of the testing.

With that said, the video editor for Adobe, Premiere Pro, is still in beta status. I’ve not heard anything bad about the beta other than a few “quirks,” but it’s believed that the beta runs circles around the Intel version on performance.

Better Collaboration Tools and More Tools for Lightroom

I tend to focus more on the photography side of things when it comes to the Creative Cloud. Yes, I use Premiere, and After Effects, but I open Lightroom and Photoshop more often. Unfortunately, I’m not on an M1 so I don’t see these particular performance boosts. But Adobe has added more ways to collaborate on the photography front with cloud collaboration capability. This allows you to get an extra set of eyes on your photos project and tweak the editing before clicking “post” to Instagram or whatever your platform of choice is.

Image by Adobe

Image by Adobe

Far as the editing tools, the AI tool found in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) which enabled you to convert an image to a much higher resolution image is now available in Lightroom Classic as well as Lightroom. This Super Resolution feature touts increasing your photog resolution by up to 4X. In my experience, the previous iteration was “ok.” Wasn’t great, but it did make a difference.

Adobe has a lot more information on its blog regarding the updates for Lightroom, Photoshop with its new custom brushes, Illustrator and more. I guess I better get myself ready to install these updates as well as find a way to get my hands on an M1 Mac. Ha!

Adobe Gives Props To Some Up and Coming Photographers

Adobe has been giving recognition and props to up and coming photographers around the world for the last four years. Today it featured this year’s noteworthy photographers. All with not only a beautiful portfolio to their credit, but also fascinating back stories.

I’m not going to share any of the photographers’ images here. I’d rather you click through on the image below to see them on Adobe’s blog. The photographers are:

Lia Clay Miller - The first trans woman to photograph a back-to-back cover for Out Magazine.

Andrew Morócho – An Ecuadorian photographer on a mission to empower BIPOC empathetically by evoking strength in feeling, through use of color and symbolism

Lara Jackson – A wildlife photographer and devoted conservation biologist who aims to share important conservation success stories.

Now-a-days, there’s ample time to learn a new craft or skill. Photography is one of them. Photography is so much more accessible now. Smartphones are the gateway. If you’ve been curious about photography, I say start now. You’ve got nothing to lose. Heck, maybe you’ll be featured by Adobe one day.

Image via Adobe

Image via Adobe



Refine Edge and More Now On Photoshop For iPad: UPDATE

Supposedly, most creators are pushing for a more mobile workflow for their creativity. Hence why the likes of Adobe wanting to put more tools in the cloud and your mobile devices. Today Adobe announced another update to its Photoshop on iPad product.

Refine Edge Brush

This tool is used mostly when making selections of objects that don’t particularly have defined edges or contrast. Ok, maybe that didn’t make any sense. Let me give you an example.If you have a photo of a person with big hair and you’d like to cut them away from the background, you’ll need to use your selection tool to do so. The problem is the big hair can be quite a tedious task to handle as it’s hard to cleanly select wispy hair. Adobe’s Sensei AI does a good job with its refine edge tool to make those difficult selections. But, that was only available on the desktop version of Photoshop. That functionality is now on the iPad version.

Image credit: Adobe

Image credit: Adobe

Rotation Tool

First off, in Photoshop for the desktop, I think this is the most underrated tool. This tool is used to rotate your canvas while you’re working. Highly useful if you’re doing some fine retouching on a portrait and need to touch up eyes or lips. Rotating the canvas makes it easier on your hand for your mouse or stylus to successfully complete your brush strokes. This is now available on the iPad version of Photoshop.

Image credit: Adobe

Image credit: Adobe


If you’re interested in more details on these new updates, Adobe shares it all on its blog post here. Nice update, but the best thing about this blog post in my opinion is the closing paragraphs. Good on ya, Adobe.