I have been using my upgrade copy of Photoshop CS3 this week and I am very impressed.

The interface changes are not that different to CS2 and so I am able to quickly find my way around. The improvements are many and I will not list them here as I plan a separate CS3 review a a later date.

What I want to highlight is the much improved, and now very useful, Photomerge tool. Photomerge is Photoshops action driven image stitching solution.

It has been available in previous Photoshop versions, via the Automate menu item, but has never been good enough. It nearly always resulted in a final image with some form of visible banding. I have had to resort to either stand-alone stitching software or to the time consuming use of Photoshop's layers and blending.

Photoshop CS2 - Photomerge result, visible blending!

Photoshop CS3 introduces two new commands; "Auto-Align Layers" and "Auto-Blend Layers" which both used by the Automate/Photomerge tool. Plus you now have a choice of settings and options as to how to merge the files.

New Photomerge layout settings in CS3

The results are very impressive. I have returned to a number of my panoramas and recreated them with CS3 and have been very pleased. Here is the final version of the merged images above using CS3.

Photoshop CS3 Photomerge result using the Automate command and the Auto layout setting

Third party stitching tools could be a thing of the past for me!
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Technorati Tags: , Photoshop CS3, adobe, photography, Photoshop, workflow

Tags: Photoshop

I still shoot slide film and in order to allow me to work on my images digitally I scan my images with a slide scanner.
Slide scanning is quite a steep learning curve and even when you do master it you often suffer from significant amounts of noise in the scanned image. The grainy effect of slide scanning was something I lived with until I discovered NoiseWARE from IMAGENOMIC.

NoiseWARE is a sophisticated Photoshop plug-in which allows you to remove noise from your image but will minimize the noise reduction on the less-noisy and other areas of critical detail.

The plugin allows you to see both before and after views of the effect of noise removal. There are lots of viewing options to choose from including horizontal and vertical before and after screen views. Also the work area of the plugin can be resized to fit what ever screen area you want.

NoiseWARE Photoshop Plugin - sky selected as area for noise removal

The image above is a particularly noisy in the sky. Selecting one or more areas of the image allows noise removal to be based on the chosen areas. If you don't want to get in to that level of complexity you can just have Noiseware do the removal process automatically.

There are a whole host of presets including ones for Landscape, Portraits etc. If you really want fine control you can fine tune the removal process by noise frequency, colour and tonal range. Sharpening can be turned off altogether or set as you want.

NoiseWARE vs Photoshop built in Dust and Grain filter

I compared using NoiseWARE with the built in Photoshop "Dust and Grain" noise filter and you can see that NoiseWARE preserves the fine detail as well as the detail in the non sky area.

NoiseWARE is fast in operation and can take advantage of dual processors. It claims to process an 8 MPixel image in under 4 seconds. My images are usually start at about 64MB in photoshop and typically take 7 seconds to process.
Other product features include:

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• Self-learning noise profiles
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• Bracketing and Multiple previews
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• 16 bit supported
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• batch processing via Photoshop Actions
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Conclusion
I have no association with IMAGENOMIC. It's a great product which has improved my workflow. I would score it 5 out of 5.
Good luck and good shooting.

NoiseWARE professional lists for $69.95 and is available in both Mac and Windows versions.

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Link to NoiseWARE product page on the IMAGENOMIC website.

Technorati Tags: adobe, photography, Photoshop, workflow

Tags: Photoshop

When preparing your images in Photoshop for web use make sure that you convert your profile to sRGB before saving. Otherwise your colours will look washed out.

Lets assume you are working in AdobeRGB colour space and you just save for the web. You will imeadiately lose a huge amount of colour information as the colour space of AdobeRGB will not fit into sRGB and the result is a very washed out image. See example below.

Left - Original 'adobe98' Image, Right - Image saved without profile conversion to sRGB prior to Web Save.

The trick is to use the 'Convert to Profile' which can be found under the main 'Edit' menu and to select sRGB before you save for Web. Your colours will be preserved.

It's really easy to miss this vital step when saving your images for the Web. Hope this helps.

Lightroom tips.

Aperture and Photoshop tips.

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Tags: Photoshop