Lunacore Photoshop Blog

Lunacore has released a detailed review of the Total Training’ Photoshop CS2 video course.

This review is split into 7 sections:

- Introduction
- What you get
- The presenter
- Installation
- The Interface
- Content and presentation
- Conclusion

Check it out here.

It’s final; the Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 will be launched very soon, to be exactly on March 27th.

Check out the Adobe web site.

Read one of our previous posts to find out what Photoshop CS3 has to offer.

In this episode of Photoshop TV
- How to make a James Bond style screen effect using the Fibers, Cutout and Twirl filters.
- Put a showroom finish on a car with Shadow/Highlight adjustments and Levels.
- Create an Andy Warhol style effect with a psychedelic animation effect.

News
Scott Kelby has the breaking news on Adobe’s announcement of Photoshop CS3 and CS3 Extended.

This Week’s To-Do List
- Sign up at Fotolia.com to buy and sell photography and design
- Get amazing tips and tricks for just about everything at Lifehacker.com
- Stay up to date on the latest software at VersionTracker.com

The new Adobe Photoshop CS3 will be available in two different versions: Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe Photoshop CS2 Extended.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended allows you to render and incorporate 3D images into your 2D designs, edit motion graphics on video or probe your images with measurement, analysis, and visualization tools.

More about this on the Adobe web site.

In Vanishing Point, a tool available since Photoshop CS2, you can save the current grid to your document window by holding down the Alt key (Option key on the Mac) when you click OK to close the Vansihing Point window. The grid will then be saved to your current layer (recommended is to save it to an empty layer). You can then change its color, warp it or apply any other kind of effect.
The resulting grid is not ani-aliased, so the lines don’t look smooth. You can avoid this by creating the image in a large document (several thousands of pixels wide/high) and then resize the image to the format you’re working with.

The grid can also be useful for perspective drawing in Photoshop by transforming it using Edit/Transform/Distort.

In the 67th episode of Photoshop TV, Matt, Scott and Dave share the following subjects with you:

- The best new features of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: Target Adjustment Tool, Keyword Stamper, Virtual Copies and Tone Curve.
- How to use the Hue and Saturation in Adjustment Layers.
- How to use Free Transform for repeat Actions and across multiple Layers

This Week’s To-Do List
- Check out the new tutorials at PlanetPhotoshop.com
- Get a ton of Photoshop news and tips from Trevor Morris’s site.
- Enjoy the art of typography at Type For You.

The Mother of All Photoshop Sweepstakes
Enter to win an Alaskan cruise from the good people at Cruising Through Life and join our own Dave Cross, Moose Peterson and Vincent Versace for 7 days of amazing nature photography, Photoshop instruction and the best time you’ll ever have learning.

Prize contest
How you can win a full year of Layers magazine.

If you’re one of those people who love to study Photoshop by watching video tutorials, then it might be a good idea to visit PixelPerfect by Bert Monroy.

In 16 epsiodes (and growing) Bert is showing the viewer in great detail how to do things in Photoshop:

- Layer masks and alpha channels
- Making a ray gun
- Shadows
- Making tubes
- Filter effects
- Type effects
- Making a lamp
- Patterns and animation
- Lightning
- Drops of water
- Rapid weathering
- The extract command
- Colorizing

In episode 10-12 Bert also explains behind the scene certain aspect of his huge Photoshop work called Damen, a 15,000 layer Photoshop design.

On the Lunacore Forum I’ve posted an example of using Photoshop CS3′ Smart Filters to make a non-destructive skin correction, based on Lunacore’s original Smooth Skin tutorial.

You can check it out here.

Adobe released the beta of Photoshop CS3. This beta which can be downloaded from Adobe Labs is free for all licensed users of either the Photoshop CS2 (full, upgrade, and education), Adobe Creative Suite 2 Standard or Premium (full, upgrade, and education), Adobe Production Studio Standard and Premium (full, upgrade, and education), Adobe Video Bundle (full, upgrade, and education) or Adobe Web Bundle (full, upgrade, and education).

If you’re not a licensed user of any of these products, then you’re only allowed to try out the product for 2 days.

Some of the new features/improvements:

- Auto align layers
- Auto blend for stitched images
- Smart filters (non-destructive filters (including Shadows and Highlight) which you can combine with a mask)
- Quick selection tool
- Device Central 1.0
- Adjustable Cloning and Healing with preview overlay
- Zoomify (Google maps style zoom interface for web based images)
- Improved Curves
- Enhanced Channel Mixer (filter presets)
- Refine Edge (to modify the edge of any selection)
- Refined interface (see examples below)
- Enhanced Brightness/Contrast
- New advanced Black and White conversion tool
- Improved print window
- 2 new blend modes: Lighter Color, Darker Color
- Enhanced Photo Merge function
- Enhanced Merge to 23-Bit HDR
- New Bridge version
- Improved vanishing point with multiple, adjustable angle perspective planes
- Camera Raw 4.0

For more detailed information and issues, check the release notes for Photoshop CS3.

There is also a Photoshop CS3 forum that you can visit here.

Visit MacWorld.com for a video interview with Photoshop’s senior product manager John Nack. At the end of the video Jason shows off some of Photoshop CS3’s new features.

Note: you can also download the complete interview on that same page. If you have problems with the file that you downloaded, then rename the extension .mov to .m4v

Also don’t forget to check out the web site of Photoshop guru Russell Brown, who just finished a few Photoshop CS3 video tutorials:

- CS3 Smart Filters
- CS3 The All New Photo Merge
- CS3 Converting Color to Black & White
- CS3 Auto-Align and Auto-Blend Layers
- CS3 The New Clone Source Feature

Also worth mentioning is that Lynda.com offers a free preview video training for Photoshop CS3 by no other than Deke McClelland.

My experience with Photoshop CS3 on a E6600 Core2Duo PC is that it runs fast and reliable, which is very positive considering it’s still a beta.
The redesigned palettes are something we all need to get used to, but I predict that in the long term most users are going to appreciate the changes. For now the feature I enjoy the most is smart filters.

I’m not a huge fan of copying photographs myself, but when someone achieves excellent results like this and is also willing to describe in text and pictures how she did it (important!), then that’s enough reason for me to mention it on the blog. The image was not traced, done in several layers and a tablet was used.

Note: the image that’s on this page is rather large (over 2MB), so be aware of that if you have a slow internet connection.