Feature Articles 

Photoshop Articles

The Blend If sliders found in the Layer (Style) Blending Options dialog box are a powerful layer compositing tool. The Blend If sliders allows one to blend and mask layer content, based on "Gray" values or the individual colour mode channels of the file. This command is often overlooked in favour of using a layer mask, as it is usually obvious when a layer mask is required. Unfortunately, it may not be apparent to many users of layer masks when Blend If sliders may be used to full effect. It is advised that you take your time to explore the Blend If sliders, as you will find many situations where they provide a quick and elegant solution, in lieu of or in addition to layer masks. Read the full article here.

Convolution is a basic operation found in raster image editing software. Building custom convolution filter kernels is an elementary task for image processing students, although this is often far from being the case for the average Photoshop user from a GUI background. With regular filters offering speed, flexibility and ease of use - Custom filtering is often an esoteric subject that is forgotten in the exploration of more powerful and user friendly filters. Custom filters still have limited use, even in Photoshop - particularly so for feature detection beyond the Find Edges or Glowing Edges filters. Read the full article here.

 

The File Browser was introduced as a major update to Photoshop 7 and was later improved in Photoshop CS. In the Creative Suite 2, it has evolved into a separate application named Adobe Bridge. When a directory is viewed for the first time, the File Browser or Bridge will build a cache of the image previews. The image preview/thumbnail generation process is moderately fast when dealing with smaller files and fast hard disks, but is less responsive with larger files, CD's or DVD's. When burning a data CD or DVD of your images, one can speed up the future process of viewing the disks contents in the File Browser or Bridge by including the cache for the directory that contains the images. Read the full article here.

There are a number of seemingly obvious commands and operations in Photoshop which may lead to results that may differ from what the user expects. In some cases results could prove disastrous for the unwary, while other issues are simply minor annoyances. Read the full article here.

This short article demonstrates via image swaps the differences in results between the Vibrance control in Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop CS4. The effect of Normal vs. Color/Saturation blends are also included for your reference. Read the full article here.

 

This article will introduce a new approach for sharpening with the Smart Sharpen filter, which does not use masks or selections and minimises excessive noise amplification and distracting halos. The method outlined below makes use of a 25+ year old image processing technique that may be unknown to many Photoshop users, in order to facilitate the application and improve the results of the Smart Sharpen filter. Although the sharpening properties of this approach are best suited for acquisition/capture and monitor viewing sharpening, it is also possible to exaggerate the effect to produce wider, less subtle halos which are suitable for output sharpening for halftone or stochastic based print. Read the full article here.

Graphics Articles

Linotype FontExplorer X is a local font manager/viewer and online font selection/shopping application for Mac OS X (Panther and Tiger). Expect to be surprised by this feature rich, free offering from Linotype - it actually works as advertised! Linotype FontExplorer X offers manual and auto font activation/deactivation, sets, smart sets, folders, conflict warning, system and application font cache cleaning and many other features. Read the full article here.

SharpControl is a free MS Windows program for image sharpening with many advanced functions that is worthy of deeper exploration. SharpControl is based upon a proprietary sharpening implementation found in a commercial image processing tool for medical applications, rather than conventional UnSharp Mask. Read the full article here.