Robert Hardgrave print from Pressure Printing. David Pescovitz:

The artisans at Pressure Printing have released a beautiful limited edition print by Seattle artist Robert Hardgrove. (Full image at left, detail at right.) Pressure Printing's relief printing process enhances Hardgrove's swirling, intricate, organic imagery with a wonderful tactility. Each print, limited to 30 total, is 12" x 14.25" and hand-pressed on handmade paper. Price for the print, titled "Bloodline," is $100. Link

Adjusting your photographs to get the color 'just right' can be a chore. Think about this: The Old Masters of painting spent years of their lives learning about color. Why let all their effort go to waste on the walls of some museum when it could be used to give you a hand with color correction?

When Photoshop entered the CS series it included a new tool called 'Match Color.' This tools was made so that you could match a series of photos to one another.

But there is another thing you can do with 'Match Color' that is much cooler: You can match the colors in your photos to those in famous paintings.

I keep a directory of about 30 of my favorite paintings and anytime I need to do color correction, I just scan through them to find the one that gives the photo I'm working on the best look.

This technique can be used in other ways. For example, use the color from a scanned-in 1970's Kodachrome snapshot to give a recent photo a vintage look. Need to make a picture more menacing? Use the color from a picture of a storm.

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From a smoking room in Mumbai. Is this enough to put you off smoking?

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Eye diseases gave great painters different vision of their work

Source: PhysOrg.com

Michael Marmor, MD, wanted to know what it was like to see through the eyes of an artist. Literally.

After writing two books on the topic of artists and eye disease, the Stanford University School of Medicine ophthalmologist decided to go one step further and create images that would show how artists with eye disease actually saw their world and their canvases.

Combining computer simulation with his own medical knowledge, Marmor has recreated images of some of the masterpieces of the French impressionistic painters Claude Monet and Edgar Degas who continued to work while they struggled with cataracts and retinal disease.

The results are striking.

In Marmor’s simulated versions of how the painters would most likely have seen their work, Degas’ later paintings of nude bathers become so blurry it’s difficult to see any of the artist’s brush strokes. Monet’s later paintings of the lily pond and the Japanese bridge at Giverny, when adjusted to reflect the typical symptoms of cataracts, appear dark and muddied. The artist’s signature vibrant colors are muted, replaced by browns and yellows.

“These simulations may lead one to question whether the artists intended these late works to look exactly as they do,” said Marmor who has long had interest in both the mechanics of vision and the vision of artists. “The fact is that these artists weren’t painting in this manner totally for artistic reasons.”

Degas and Monet were both founders of the Impressionist era, and their artistic styles were well formed before their eye disease affected their vision. But their paintings grew significantly more abstract in later life as, coincidentally, their eye problems increased.

“Contemporaries of both have noted that their late works were strangely coarse or garish and seemed out of character to the finer works that these artists had produced over the years,” Marmor wrote in a paper titled “Ophthalmology and Art: Simulation of Monet’s Cataracts and Degas’ Retinal Disease” that was published in the December issue of the Archives of Ophthalmology.

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EMI takes locks off music tracks. Apple and EMI will sell songs without copy protection, in a major change to the way most people buy music online. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]
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Image Stacks in Photoshop CS3 Extended

Of all the new features in Photoshop CS3, those that stand out for me most are the ones that have been built around the new Align Content feature, engineered by Jeff Chien.

For example, you can use Align Content in Perspective mode to align group portraits and it is now possible to create really accurate Photomerge composites automatically.

Now that Adobe has announced Photoshop CS3 Extended alongside the regular version of Photoshop CS3, we can let you know about what some of the extended features will allow you to do. Of these, the Image Stacks rendering is, in my view at least, one of the most interesting new features in Photoshop CS3, better than Live Filters.

The new Stacks feature was engineered by Chris Cox and was originally designed as a tool for analytical work, where you could place a series of images together in alignment and apply a Stacks rendering to the layers and use this to process them in such a way that Photoshop will highlight the differences found between the layers, or as is shown below, blend the layers according to where there is a high frequency of recurring pixel values to display only the most commonly occuring pixel values. But I have also managed to discover several key creative uses for Image Stacks.

For this first demo, I had a series of six pictures where there was always at least one person walking through a scene. Using image stacks, I was able to automatically remove them from the shot.

Figure 1- Here is a sequence of photographs that were shot hand held over a time period of a minute or so. There were a lot of people walking in front of the fountain and I just made sure that I captured enough shots so that each portion of the picture had two or more frames where someone wasnít in front of the camera.

Figure 2- I opened all of these photographs in Photoshop and went to the File ? Scripts menu to choose: Load Files into Stack. This opened the dialog shown here, where I chose Use: Open Files and checked the Attempt to Automaticallly Align Source Images and Create Smart Object after Loading Layers options.

Figure 3- Depending on how many pictures you have and how large they are, it may take a few minutes to process all the photographs. What you will end up with will be a new document with a Smart Object layer that contains all the previously open image documents as layers grouped within the smart object. If you double-click on the Smart Object layer you will see the full expanded list of layers contained in this Smart Object.

Figure 4- And now for the clever part. If you have the Smart Object open, make sure you close it again. You will want to start with the Smart Object selected (see the Layers palette top left). Go to the Layer menu and choose Smart Objects ? Image Stack Mode ? Median. Again, the stacks rendering may take a little while to complete. In the result shown here, the Median rendering managed to blend the layers such that nearly all of the people in the merged picture disapppeared completely.

Figure 5- The image stack median rendering did a pretty good job of removing the people, but there were still a few ghost outlines left. Obviously some people were having too good a time in the sun to want to move around much. Plus there were a few bits of rubbish and artifacts around the edges of the picture where the frames had overlapped. I tidied up the final picture by adding a little bit of spotting on a new layer and added some masked curves adjustment layers to provide some dodging and burning to produce the final version shown here.

Tips for getting the best results
When you see this technique demonstrated it does at first look quite magical, but there is a logical explanation for how the process works. The technique relies mainly on the use of the auto-align command to align a chosen set of sample images together and place them within a grouped smart object. After doing a little bit of experimentation I have found that if you record at least five or six (or more) exposures, this should provide enough separate images for Photoshop to process in order to work out which pixels appear most frequently at any particular spot in the picture and use the most commonly occurring pixels only to produce the finished blend shown here.

Removing noise using multiple exposures
Here is a technique that makes use of the Stacks feature in Photoshop CS3 to merge a set of identical exposures and obtain a smoother-looking image.

Figure 6

Figure 7

Figure 8- I started by going to the File menu and choosing Scripts ? Load Files into Stack and selected a set of five images to open that had all been shot at identical exposures of a subject with the camera fixed to the tripod. These were photographs that had been shot at a high ISO setting using a long exposure in low light conditions. I checked the Align Source images and Create Smart Object options and clicked OK.

Figure 9- The selected images opened as a single image document grouped together as a single smart object. If I were to double-click on the smart object icon, this would open the smart object in a separate document window and allow me access to all the individual layers, which wasnít necessary in this case, but would be if you wanted to edit any of the individual layers.

Figure 10

Figure 11- Back in the original Smart Object document, I went to the Layer menu and chose Image Stacks ? Image Stack Rendering ? Median. The processing may take a little while, depending on the size and number of layers, plus bit depth. Once completed, you will notice how the Smart Object layer has a ëstacksí icon indicating the smart object has been rendered using the stacks feature.

Figure 12

Figure 13- Here is a comparison showing a close-up view of a single exposure (Figure 12) and a rendered version (Figure 13) where five separate exposures were merged to produce a smoother, noise-free image. The Median rendering was used here because it analyzes the image content on all the layers and averages out the pixel values to use the most commonly occurring pixel values only, thereby elminating nearly all of the noisy pixels that occur on each of the layers.

Median versus Mean
If you are processing a series of still life captures, then a Mean stacks rendering can remove more noise than Median. For example, if you were processing astronomy pictures, you would want to use a Mean rendering.

The techniques shown here are fairly easy to accomplish. The Align Content feature is so good at recognizing areas of similarity and aligning images together as layers, that you can quite easily get away without having to use a tripod to shoot the pictures that you want to combine together. So anytime you are in a situation where you think it might be useful to remove people from a shot or you want to improve upon the image quailty capture potential of a lowlight scene, just shoot a quick sequence of shots with the camera hand held, keeping it as still as possible.

About Martin Evening

Martin, if you donít know, is a London based advertising photographer and noted expert in both photography and digital imaging. As a successful photographer, Martin is well known in London for his fashion and beauty work. Check out Martinís web site.

Martin also works with the Adobe Photoshop engineering team consulting on new feature development and alpha and beta testing. He worked alpha & beta for Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and was influential with the new Adobe Bridge 2.0 and Camera Raw 4.0.

In addition, Martin is also a principal of PixelGenius where he designed and was product manger for the recently released PhotoKit Color 2. PhotoKit Color 2 applies precise color corrections, automatic color balancing and creative coloring effects. PhotoKit Color offers a comprehensive set of coloring tools for Photoshop 7.0, CS, CS2 (and soon CS3) for both Macintosh and Windows.

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