Photoshop Tutorials - Special Offer

Finding Photoshop tutorials that are easy to understand and which address the basics in a comprehensive manner is not easy. I can highly recommend tutorials by local photographer and world famous photo-blogger David Nightingale.

David is publishing via his website www.chromasia.com an excellent series of on-line Photoshop tutorials that are proving extremely popular. David was a university lecturer before he became a full time photographer and this shows in his easy to follow tutorial style.

The tutorials, published monthly, have so far covered :-

• Tonal Range and the Curve tool
• Toning coloured images
• Black and White – part one
• Landscapes: creating dramatic skies
• Portraits: part one
• Next month: An introduction to LAB colour mode.
  

Each tutorial comes with a set of down-loadable images for you to practice with, video clips to explain particular points and a printable pdf document.

There is a modest charge for each tutorial or an annual subscription is available for less tha the cost of a photography magazine. Dave Nightingale is offering PPS members a special limited period offer 25% discount for an annual subscriptions. For more information and a sample tutorial click here.

Or you can find out more about the individual tutorials by clicking this link.

Shutterchance Workspace Problem

Processing images for upload to Shuterchance.

I noticed recently that some of my images were being degraded when uploaded to Shutterchance. This was mainly evident in well saturated colour images. See example here. After some experimentation and an exchange in the Shutterchance Forum I came to the conclusion that the problem was due to my images having an AdobeRGB profile whereas Shutterchance webpages appear to require images with an sRGB profile. Images which are not in sRGB are automatically converted on upload. As sRGB contains less colour information than Adobe RGB profiles there is a loss of colour information, ie some de-saturation!

This is my workaround:-

1. Open your image in Photoshop (CS2: v9) and if the Workspace is not sRGB change it before you start any further processing.
2. I would start by copying the image.
3. To change to sRGB, go to Edit, Assign Profile, and choose sRGB, click OK.
4. You can check the Workspace ID on the bottom margin of your image.
5. The information displayed in the margin by default is the size of the image in pixels, this can be changed by clicking the black arrowhead in the margin, choose “Show” and you will get a list of options one of which will be “Document Profile”, this displays the Workspace identity.
6. I set other image parameters as:-
   Dimensions 72 px/inch, smallest side dimension 700px or largest side maximum 1000px
   JPEG compression 12

I am no Workspace expert so if I you disagree with my comments I would be pleased if you would correct them.