Huh, this guy actually knows his stuff. This is pretty much the best way to do skin and clothing. I am rather surprised someone made such a good tutorial of it. Many props to FX-Ray.
Sculpting with Light
For 35 years, I’ve been a fine art and commercial studio photographer and for 24 of those years, I’ve used Light Painting (I like to refer to it as “Sculpting with Light”) as my method of lighting subjects. Many years ago, I discovered that light painting was not only a great tool for solving problems (which was initially the reason I started experimented with it), but it also was a way to enhance, reveal and celebrate certain aspects of subjects that weren’t visible to me under normal lighting conditions! There is a transformational quality to the light, and ordinary objects can become extraordinary when seen in this “new” light.
Making the ultimate creative content OS from bits of Windows, Mac, and Linux | Ars Technica
The recent unveiling of the Mac Pro has divided a lot of professional users who hoped Apple wouldn't fix what wasn't broken. Phil Schiller's words from the announcement—"can't innovate anymore, my ass"—made it clear that Apple used the venerable workstation as a Guinea pig to prove that it can still get its machined-aluminum groove on. Sure, the design and engineering of the Darth Pro are brilliant, but as I pointed out in my critical look, the Mac Pro needed shrinking as urgently as I need a Hermès man-purse. Whether it will pay off remains to be seen, but some people who want more flexible hardware options aren't convinced. I know one video editor who's already abandoned OS X for Windows because their work depends more on GPU power with apps like DaVinci Resolve. A big box with multiple PCI Express slots is more important to them than added desk space.
So this is pretty much exactly where I am at with my work flow as well. Great write up.
Video Library — Ctrl+Paint - Digital Painting Simplified
This is the Library, where you'll find all of the free Ctrl+Paint videos. If you're a total beginner, try watching the videos in the order they're listed! I've ordered these videos to ease you from traditional techniques into digital ones. If you're looking for a specific topic, or want to build your own curriculum, I invite you to watch them in any order you like! Scroll down to see the whole list, and have fun painting!
Just gonna put this here....
Source: http://ctrlpaint.com/library/
Harddrive not on desktop or Finder but visible to Disk Utility in 10.8.3
Work up to a odd little bug this morning. Booted up the Mac and one of my drives was not showing up on the desktop or in the Finder window. So first thing I do is launch Disk Utility and I see it sitting there all fine a dandy. Odd, me thinks. So I run some repairs, fix permissions, sfae boot, zap pram and everything is all good but no hard drive on desktop still. Perplexing. So then I right click on it to reveal in Finder and this happens.
I get a "Ghosted" version there with all my files there and I can browse just fine (I just greyed out the file names in the screen cap). So it turns out that the Preferences somehow got scrambled and set this drive to invisible and repairing permissions will not fix it. Off to the googles where I found this page on how to fix it. Basically open terminal and enter this:
chflags nohidden /Volumes/YOUR DRIVE NAME HERE/
And there you have it. Apple seems to have a lot of bugs at start up and with permissions these days. If you keep losing connection to your PC look into this hack to fix that glitch as well.
Focus Stacking Tut
Adventure photo journalist Jay Goodrich highlights how he overcomes diffraction issues with today's digital cameras and lenses by stacking multiple focal point images in Adobe Photoshop CS6 via Adobe Lightroom 4.
This is a very handy technique for all shooters IMO. I suggest using it on many shoots. At least shoot for and then have your post guy do all the mucky muck of the tweaking. Think of it all as information.
While I am on the topic, ALWAYS shoot plates. Always. Clear the set and take 5 steps back and shoot a clean set. My god people, almost every job the clients asks for more space on the left and we are trying to figure out how to recreate a airport / field / set / bar / gold course / stadium / you name it.
A Detailed Explanation of How Photoshop Blend Modes Work
Working with blend modes is almost always an experimental process. Because it’s nearly impossible to predict the results, you always seem to end up experimenting with different modes and Fill Opacities until you get the results you’re looking for.In this article I’m going to give you a high-level view of what the various blend modes do, and then I’ll dig deeper into the nuts and bolts of the blend modes by explaining some of the math involved, and their interrelationships with each other. I’m not going to “show” you how the blend modes work—I’m going to “explain” how they work. By the time you finish reading this article, you should have a better idea of how to use blend modes and where to begin your “experimentation,” which in turn should reduce the time it takes to achieve the results you’re looking for.
Great run down on one of the most important parts of a lot of post work. This all applies to many other FX programs as well. These modes exist in After Effects and Modo as well. I Highly suggest anyone interested in geting the most out of their imagery to study up on them.
How to photograph lightning: A tutorial | Richard Gottardo Photography
A common mistake people make when shooting lightning, is exposing for the scene they are shooting instead of exposing for the lightning shot. Shooting lightning has a LOT in common with flash photography, where the majority of the light in your photo will be coming from the strike itself and not from any ambient light sources. You will want to set an exposure time for between 20 and 30 seconds where a normal shot without lightning will be totally black. The settings I find that usually work for me are around F/7 ISO 100 and 30s for lighting that is very powerful and very close, down to about f/5 ISO 100 and 30s for lighting that is a bit farther off in the distance. You will need to take a few test shots to really dial in the right settings. All of the photos shown in this tutorial were taken at around F/7 ISO 100 30s so this is really a great starting point
One of the projects I have always wanted to do but have not had the time or the weather. Not many lightning storms in Portland.
http://www.richardgottardo.com/
Shooting High-Resolution Macro Photos of Snowflakes
The manual for the MP-E 65mm lens I use has an aperture conversion chart, which allows me to calculate the “effective aperture at given settings and magnifications. For example, setting the lens to a 5:1 magnification and f/16 will result in an aperture of f/96. At that aperture, diffraction limiting plays a huge role in giving you a blurry image, and your snowflake still wouldn’t be in focus from front to back.My solution is to slowly move the camera forward and backward through the focus of the snowflake, firing off as many images as possible. I may take up to 200 images of the same crystal, and then choose between 30-40 of them to combine together. Because I’m shooting hand-held, the frames I need are often unevenly spaced and out of order.
Each image is done entirely hand-held. No tripods or focusing rails are used in any of my images. I’m often asked why, and the answer is: necessity. If I took the time to line the subject up perfectly on a tripod, the snowflake will have either melted, blown away or be smothered by other falling snow.
