Tip: Sharpen Your Digital Photos with the Unsharp Mask

Photography Tip: Sharpen Your Digital Photos with the Unsharp Mask

A great Tip from lifehacker!

Photography web site Photojojo details how to get crisp, beautiful prints from your digital photos with Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask. What’s the point of sharpening, you ask?

Digital cameras have a fixed grid of pixels, each of which can only capture one color or shade at a time. Say you take a picture that has a sharp edge between black and white… The single pixel that records that hairline edge can only record one color, so it renders it as gray. What we think of as sharpness is actually the contrast we see between different colors. A quick transition from black to white looks sharp. A gradual transition from black to gray to white looks blurry.
A little time with the Unsharp Mask, though, and you can lose the blur along the edge of color transitions and bring more sharpness and fidelity to your photos, and Photojojo’s guide is an excellent starting point”

(Via lifehacker .)

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“Geek Tip” How to Miniaturize a Scene

How to Miniaturize a Scene

Miniaturize a Scene
It’s called a tilt-shift effect. It’s a favorite device of fine-art photographers and the Flickr crowd. The idea is to keep a narrow band of a picture in sharp focus while blurring everything else. The result: a sprawling photo-scape suddenly looks like a scale model. To pull it off you need an expensive tilt-shift lens -— or this simple Photoshop trick.
This page is a wiki. Got extra advice? Log in and add it.

How To Proceed

1. Import your image to Photoshop, then press Q to enter Quick Mask mode.

2. Select the Gradient tool and set it to Reflected Gradient. Click on the area you want to be in focus and drag the cursor in the direction you want the image to blur.

3. Press Q again to complete the mask and exit Quick Mask mode

4. Invert your selection with CTRL+SHIFT+I (in Windows) once you quit Quick Mask, otherwise you’ll blur the section you actually want to keep in focus 🙂

5. Apply a blur filter from the Filters menu.

6. Marvel at your masterpiece.

(Via Wired News.)

Leopard Photoshop Plug-In

Online Photoshop Plug-In Ready for Leopard

For Web designers who need to upload things they make in photoshop, there is a a new easy plug-in for Photoshop called SiteGrinder 2 that lets you convert documents directly to Cascade Style Sheet (CSS) code right in Photoshop.  Both the basic and the pro versions the ability to upload everything from videos and slideshows to flash animations and interactive menus directly to a website, while keeping the same layouts and design exactly as it would appear in Photoshop

“We’re very excited to be releasing SiteGrinder 2 for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard,” said Thomas Summerall, co-founder and President of Media Lab, Inc. “SiteGrinder 2 puts extremely powerful and easy-to-use webpage creation capabilities in the hands of our customers, letting them focus exclusively on their designs rather than on confusing webpage code. SiteGrinder 2 lets customers take ownership of their websites like never before, and at an extremely reasonable price point”.  The program costs $129 and $349 for basic and pro respectively. Media Lab, inc. and Sitegrinder have quite the reputation (Media Lab’s products, including SiteGrinder, have been used in multiple Hollywood movies, along with productions at Disney World), so hopefully the product will live up to its name.

Via [MacMegasite]
(Via Appletell.)

aGEEKspot #2

Old News – Last week at CES, lots of cool new stuff was debuted, but everything was over-shadowed by blogger shenanigans and Bill Gates’ celebrity-filled farewell video. A staff member from the website Gizmodo enjoyed a fun prank by using a TV-B-Gone remote to turn off TV’s, monitors, and displays while live demos were being held. The punishment from CES: banned for life thus giving bloggers a bad name in the process! Since this was Bill Gates’ final address at CES, he (meaning his billion dollar staff) put together a little farewell video with a star-studded line up including Matthew McConaughey, Jay-Z, Jon Stewart Barack Obama, Al Gore, Steven Spielberg, George Clooney…the list goes on and on. It even makes Bill seem, dare I say, humorous. Oh yeah, and there was a 150″ Plasma TV there, too.

Newer News – Sony announced that it will start selling DRM-free MP3’s on Amazon.com, making Amazon the first retailer to have all four major labels on board. Now all eyes are on iTunes to see if they jump on the DRM-free bandwagon. The battle may be over between Blu-ray and HD DVD’s as Warner Bros. Entertainment will be releasing its high-definition titles “exclusively in the Blu-ray disc format beginning later this year.” If that wasn’t bad enough, New Line Cinema has just announced its defection to Blu-ray. I guess being blu isn’t so bad after all.

Breaking News – Macworld begins this week in San Francisco. Even though there doesn’t seem to be quite the same level of excitement as with the iPhone announcement last year, there are still plenty of rumors about what will be released. The first is the MacBook Air, a small, lightweight, ultra portable laptop. Also rumored is a new iTunes featuring movie rentals. They both sound good, I guess we will have to wait and see.In the face of rumors that Apple would offering movie rentals, Netflix announced that they are allowing customers to stream an unlimited number of movies for a flat monthly fee (starting at $8.99). Netflix streaming, however, is not yet available on the Mac so hopefully the iTunes movie rentals will come true for all the Mac owners.

Rumor –  Pepsi and Amazon will be giving away up to 1 billion songs during a Super Bowl promotion starting Feb. 3rd. Amazon will be providing MP3s from their DRM-free Music Store!

Gadget of the Week – Free your memories… quickly, easily, and wirelessly with the tag line from today’s cool gadget – EYE-FI (pictured). The Eye-Fi Card is a wireless 2gb SD memory card. It automatically uploads pictures from your digital camera to your PC or Mac and to your favorite photo sharing, printing, blogging or social networking site. No cables, no waiting, no hassles. Plus, just this week it became compatible with iPhoto and Safari (Mac fans rejoice!) Check it Out!Do you love Photoshop but can’t justify the high cost? Well you’re in luck – Photoshop Elements 6 has just been released for only $99 (or $79 for the upgrade). Tip – Do you ever need to capture what’s on your Mac’s screen? Try this quick keyboard short cut:

•To take a picture of the whole screen, press Command-Shift-3.

•To take a picture of part of the screen, press Command-Shift-4 and drag to select the area you want. They will be saved on your desktop as an image file for easy retrieval.

 

If you have techy, geeky, nerdy, or gadgety news, reviews, tips or tricks – Let us know and we can share it with the world. Send them to: aGEEKspot at Gmail dot com