Mike Wong is the VP of Marketing at onOne Software, located in Portland, Oregon.
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I just finished up one of our free, weekly online webinars going over how to use our newest Photoshop plugin FocalPoint 1.0. If you missed the webinar, you can watch a replay of the webinar at anytime.
The webinar uses Acrobat Connect so if you've never used that before, your browser will prompt you to download and install a free plugin for your browser. Once you install it you'll be good to go!
Attention PhotoTools users! Don't forget about the new onOne Exchange website that is dedicated to presets for PhotoTools. I've just started the blog and there are only about 9 or 10 presets for you to download right now, but it's a start and I'd love to get your feedback on what you think about it.
I just posted a preset for enhancing portraits in Photoshop and have another one in the works for tomorrow so be sure to check them out.
If you have PhotoTools, but don't know how to install presets, don't worry. I've posted instructions on installing Presets for PhotoTools on the site so you'll be good to go once you start downloading them.
Developing new products from the ground up is both exciting and challenging at the same time. Exciting because you're inventing a new way to do something and Challenging because, sometimes, what you want to invent requires newer technology than might be previously and widely installed already out among your user base.
Such was the case with FocalPoint. There is a lot of heavy lifting going on behind the scenes math-wise with the different blurring algorithms and then blending them all together in a real-time manner. The result, I think, is a great user experience and that has been shown in several reviews of the product including a Hot Pick award by Photoshop User magazine. The downside is that not everybody has the hardware to run software like this.
In order to FocalPoint where we wanted it, we had to off load the majority of the work to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) as that is a very fast and efficient way to do what we wanted. The problem is that there are a lot of computers out there, mostly Windows based, that don't have a graphics card capable of doing this math as quickly as necessary and therefore run FocalPoint.
For Mac users who own relatively newer computers made in the past couple of years, this isn't a problem as the graphics card supports the necessary calls we make. For Windows users with older systems or Windows users who purchased more of a bargain machine (I'm included in this group for my last Windows based PC), the graphics cards included in those machines just aren't all that great (there's a reason there is a huge market for add-on graphics cards for Windows gamers). If you've got a Windows desktop machine and you do any kind of graphics intensive work like photo editing, video editing, gaming, etc it is worth upgrading your video card. But if you have a laptop, that's a bit tougher and requires you to pretty much buy a new one, which is a tough one to deal with.
So the reason for all of that is to get to this...we have a tool that you can run on your Windows computer to see if your video graphics card meets our minimum requirements for running FocalPoint. Please, please, please run this app before you download a demo or buy FocalPoint to make sure your system can run it.
Download the FocalPoint System Compatibility Tool.
Step 1 is to download the tool (see above)
Step 2 is to unzip the file and once unzipped you will have an app called GLView.exe
Step 3 is to double click it to launch
The lower left hand side of the window is going to be a list called GL Extensions.
Verify if GL_ARB_fragment_shader and GL_ARB_shading_language_100 are present in the list. If they are not present then your video card does not have extended GL support and unfortunately, FocalPoint will not be able to run.
If you're planning on attending Photoshop World in Las Vegas this September (and I'm sure you are) you only have 5 days left to take advantage of the advanced registration discount.
So if you haven't already, be sure to head over to the Photoshop World Registration Page today!
A while back, I mentioned in a post that we were in the process of creating a place for users to share and exchange PhotoTools presets.
Today, I'm happy to share with you that we've taken our first step down that path - though I'll admit it's not all the way there just yet. That first step is the onOne Exchange.
At the onOne Exchange, you can currently see before and after examples that I have used PhotoTools Professional Edition on and download the presets that you can use for free with PhotoTools. What I don't have in place just yet is a way on that site for you to send me or upload your presets that you have created. The site was created in WordPress (this was my first venture into setting up a WordPress install by myself and even then I ended up buying a template for the site so I had some help!) so if anyone out there knows of a WordPress plugin that allows readers to submit a file to the blog author, please let me know!
So, please go visit the onOne Exchange and leave a comment, download a preset or two and then let me know what you think or what you'd like to see next! Have a good weekend!
Whoops. I made a mistake on an earlier entry. On my entry Senior Portraits with PhotoTools, I mistakenly gave the photo credit to Dan Harlacher. The photo credit goes to his wife Whitney Stevens over at Bliss Studio. I've updated the entry to reflect that and apologize for the error.
I just saw this over at the Photoshop World site. They have a new program for anybody who is attending Photoshop World solo. It's called Dinner with a Stranger and I think it's a great idea. Here's how it works:
At the Photoshop World registration desk, there will be a sign-up sheet with the names of some great nearby local restaurants. Add your name to that list, and then grab a red pin that reads "I'm a stranger."
Then later that night (the first night of the conference), you pin it on, and head for the restaurant. When you get there, you'll find a number of other people who are wearing the same pin, and you'll be joining these other "solo flyers" for a fun dinner and great conversation in a dining room reserved just for Photoshop World "strangers."
Back in May, I posted an example of our Photoshop plugin FocalPoint in use by New York photographer Andy Marcus. Well, I've received a few more samples from Andy recently and wanted to share one of them here.
The original is on the left and the photo processed with FocalPoint is on the right. First, the original photo is a great shot and illustrates what a great photographer Andy is. Second, I think the "after" photo illustrates that Andy is an artist when he's not behind the camera as well. Having a vision of what you want to convey to your client and being able to execute that vision with a variety of tools, whether it's with a plugin or not, is a talent and Andy clearly has it.
I really like the way Andy has softened the edge and added a vignette to really bring attention and focus to the bride. Thanks for sharing your work with us Andy!
Photos copyright Andy Marcus. All rights reserved.
If you are planning on attending Photoshop World in Las Vegas in September, now is the time to register. NAPP and Non-NAPP members save $100 if you register to attend BEFORE August 1, 2008. If I'm not mistaken, the Orlando Photoshop World in April sold out, so don't delay!
I was looking through a couple of our video tutorials for our Photoshop plugins the other day and it dawned on my just how many there are up there. We have 79 videos (in Flash and QuickTime format) that cover all of our plugins for Photoshop. Seventy-nine! Wow. I knew we had a lot, but I must admit, I didn't realize there were that many.
So be sure to head over to our Tutorials page and check them out! They're all free of course!
Here's a quick tutorial for improving a senior portrait using PhotoTools Professional Edition. For those of you new to this blog, PhotoTools Professional Edition is one of our most popular plugins for Photoshop CS2 or CS3. This photo is courtesy of Whitney Stevens from Bliss Studio and is great for this tutorial.
Here's the original photo as captured, straight out of the camera. I like
We'll start out by applying the onOne Auto Skin Smoother at 50%. This will give us a nice soft, glamour style look without making the skin look plastic.
Next, we're going to use the Turbo Boost effect to enhance the colors in the photo.
In the next two steps, we're going to use two techniques to focus the viewer's attention on our senior. The first is to use the Selective Focus Gaussian Blur effect followed by the Jack Davis Darken Edges vignette effect in PhotoTools.
Selective Focus added.
Vignette added.
So far, I've stayed in PhotoTools the entire time. But now I'm going to go ahead and click the Apply button. I want to enhance the eyes still but I'm going to go back into PhotoTools and do that with a Layer Mask. All of this processing so far has darkened things a bit there and we want people to connect with this photo, so brightening the eyes is a great way to do this.
So after going back into PhotoTools, I'm going to add the Kubota Soft Wash effect combined with a Black Layer Mask so the effect doesn't show up at all in Photoshop until I grab my Brush tool and then make sure that I'm painting with white. In PhotoTools, you can automatically add this mask by checking the check box(es) in the bottom middle of the user interface window. Once I have my brush selected, I just adjust the brush size, lower my brush opacity to 50% (just press the number 5 after you select the Brush tool) and then paint over the eyes.
So there you have it, a very nice senior portrait enhancement with just a few clicks and a layer mask. Not much too it really which is the key benefit of using PhotoTools. Otherwise, we would have had to make several adjustment layers, groups and blending modes but with PhotoTools, it's just about 5 clicks!
