August 11, 2008 by Mike Wong • Comments Off
A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from somebody I had never met before. His name is Tom and he found me through some of our products and our new onOne Exchange site. He gave me some good feedback on the new blog site and looking objectively, would have to agree that he was right and subsequently made those changes. Tom went on to share with me a little bit about himself and his passion for photography and then shared with me that he has MS which, as you might suspect, is a pretty challenging condition in and of itself, but can make photography a little harder as well.
Tom also told me about how he had contacted Joe McNally to see if he would help him with a photo project he was trying to complete. You can read about that project at Joe's blog. It's a must read for several reasons.
Personally, I've taken 2 things away after reading Joe's blog entry.
1. There's always something more you can learn about photography. Seeing how Joe and his team approached this project shows what a professional Joe really is. It also shows what a quality individual Joe is as well as his team. Joe gets nothing out of this shoot other than the satisfaction of helping someone out who deserved some help. Kudos to Joe.
2. The other thing I took from this is how lucky I am. Since I read Tom's story on Joe's blog a week ago, I've reminded myself everyday that the little things that I have to deal with every day, are indeed little compared to what Tom has to deal with. Tom's story of dealing with MS and being a fighter are an inspiration to me and I've stopped myself several times over the past week alone to stop and appreciate that I'm able to do things with my son and daughter without the challenges Tom faces and to appreciate those moments even more.
Go read that blog entry now if you haven't already.
Tom is setting up a blog to help inspire people (with or without MS) to overcome challenges in Photography. I'll be sure to let everybody I know about it as soon as it's up and running as Tom has already inspired me and it has nothing to do with photography.
Keep up the fight Tom.
July 31, 2008 by Mike Wong • Comments Off
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!
July 30, 2008 by Mike Wong • Comments Off
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.
July 28, 2008 by Mike Wong • Comments Off
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.
July 28, 2008 by Mike Wong • Comments Off
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!
